


Heir to Wolves

by lishiyo



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Slavery, Dom/sub, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Sexual Slavery, Unresolved Sexual Tension, dystopian au, slave!Stiles
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-09-22
Updated: 2012-10-29
Packaged: 2017-11-14 19:05:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,796
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lishiyo/pseuds/lishiyo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Fourteen years ago, the House of Hale fell, with two bodies never found.</p><p>Nameless, packless, Derek is content with what he is now: another soldier, another commoner, another small piece of the war that goes on between werewolves and humans. </p><p>He didn’t mean to take in the slave. </p><p>The annoying, clever, all-too-*human* slave who won’t stop challenging everything Derek believes in, everything he’s fine with. </p><p>Because Derek may no longer be the heir to the throne, but he’s not the man he thinks he is either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Captive

**Author's Note:**

> This was written to fulfill my slave kink, along with my love for dystopian scifi and fantasy, UST, and politicking Stiles. Warnings for violence, language, and a slow burn. 
> 
> ALL MY LOVE FOR MY BETA No-More-Virtuous forever (CallMeBombshell on AO3).

“Are you sure, Captain?” Isaac says, hauling up the bronze muscle cuirass to the shelf with a grunt, where the morning’s light is beginning to filter through the fine dust. Voices trickle through the wakening courtyard outside; the distant bell, for the handover of the night shifts.  
  
“What do you think,” Derek says, without harshness, but without room to answer, fingers tugging loose the rough knots tied tightly round the leather satchel with quick, clean movements. “I have no need for a slave.”  
  
“Won’t be one of those milkfed buttercups who want you to carry them over puddles,” Isaac grins, wide-mouthed, pretty-faced, knowing very well how much he looks like one of those _buttercups_. “I mean, a working slave. Someone to help you keep house, cook a bit. Clean your armor. Hell, my old man used to have one just for massages - “  
  
Derek turns slightly to raise an eyebrow.  
  
“Uh - of course I  _love_ cleaning your armor, Captain, I mean, no slave’s going to be taking that away from me -”  
  
“Shut up, Isaac.”  
  
“Right.” Hastily setting down the freshly gleaming pauldron, the boy sets himself to scrubbing a set of emblemed gold greaves that Derek found somewhere beneath the stack of metal they’d hauled out to the armory corner, bedecked in cobwebs after a year of scarce use. Wolves change their ceremonial armor with the seasons, so this one’s no good except for the winter fests. Privately, Derek thinks that’s stupid; but then again, there are a lot of things Derek thinks are stupid.  
  
Isaac’s bony wrists are poking out of his brown tunic sleeves as he works. Derek makes a mental note to talk to the tailor Hynes. Isaac’s growing, he thinks, a boy of sixteen, and already taller than half the men. And - superior in combat. He won’t complain about squiring, not for Derek, but he deserves more when he can disarm several seasoned soldiers one after another like a row of squatting pigeons, the ones who taunt him for his position, his fine hands, made bolder by Isaac’s girlish face and a tongue as silver-edged and eye-catching as his blade. If it were only about fighting prowess, Derek would seek out a full, unexceptional, but respectable place for him in the regiment, one safe for a boy from a Low pack, no matter how Isaac’s head lives in the clouds where court ladies blush at flax-haired youths behind a sea of silk-foam fans.  
  
If it were only about fighting prowess.  
  
“You think it looks better,” Derek says. “For a captain.”  
  
“It’s just common,” Isaac shrugs, after a moment, though he scrubs a bit harder, copper locks tumbling over his forehead where he bends over the greaves.  
  
“You mean men talk.”  
  
“Not any of ours.” Briskly.  
  
“I know that,” Derek says, reining in the sigh. “You know I don’t have any ambitions, Isaac. I don’t play those politics. I’m fine with the way things are.”  
  
“So am I,” the boy declares, over-firmly, a bravado that belies unease to Derek’s mind. It’ll look better to the nobles if he appears more like a Captain, Derek knows that. Wears their fancy armor, indulges in their slaves. Even the progressive wolves at court and in the rumor-hungry city streets don’t like the 12th Company that Derek leads; _a collection of mutts, mongrels, and half-breeds_ , is what they call them. And their Captain, a packless wolf. An omega.  
  
A no name.  
  
A lowborn, in a highborn’s place. Without territory, without pack, without even the semblance of wealth in slaves that even the lowliest officers take for their households.  
  
“It’s not a problem,” Derek says, folding the heavy blue caparison that bears House Whittemore’s coat of arms in two. “They know I hate humans, anyways.”  
  
  
***  
  
  
Stiles manages to land a kick that rearranges the man’s crooked nose in the _other_ direction, before another two of them seize his legs and yank them, ungently, nearly an armspan’s apart, binding his ankles to the ends of the cold pine table beneath his back with thick leather straps made too obviously for this purpose.  
  
“What,” Stiles pants, licking his lip, still bleeding from the slap one of the slavers had dealt him earlier, “you make rape racks now? Thought you’d want to make us submit yourselves, bare handed. Like bear wrestling or something. Or whatever it is you guys do for fun.”  
  
From this angle, the men are broader, hulking, thick across the chest, grimy-faced with stubble and dirt stripes sheathing their trunklike arms. They are new, not the narrow, whippet-like slavers that descended upon and took Stiles’s caravan five days ago. They bear straight swords and light clothing save for their furred leather boots, in sleeveless tunics even in the winter chill that’s kept Stiles desperately rubbing his limbs in this little cell like chafing sticks for a fire. They are pale-skinned and blunt-featured and look every bit like the stereotype of werewolves, down to the hairy knuckles and shaggy chopped hair and coarse low voices that swim around outside his cell’s wooden walls, harsh, jagged-edged.  
  
One of them, the crooked-nose, juts a thick finger between Stiles’s thighs, into the loincloth that’s the last of Stiles’s covering, and laughs.  
  
Before palming him there, more gently, with more seriousness.  
  
Oh fuck.  
  
“Seriously, I guess you alpha dogs aren’t so up for a challenge after all  -”  
  
“This one needs a beating,” Another one of them grunts, and then suddenly the right side of Stiles’s abdomen blossoms in agonizing, convulsing pain from the force of a werewolf’s blow, and _fuck_ they weren’t kidding about these guys’ strength. Stiles can’t help the whimper that escapes him, even though it’s embarrassing, even though it might only be the prelude to something - worse. From the corner of his still-starbursting vision, the werewolf turns around and digs something out from the chest behind him on the ground. A rod, thin.  
  
“No.” The straw-haired man to his right suddenly breaks in, pushing back the rod with a swift flick of his wrist. “Do not harm this one. Especially the face.”  
  
“He is for one of the captains,” the straw-haired man says.  
  
“Doesn’t look like a virgin, though,” Crooked-nose mutters, with a hopeful note in his voice that Stiles doesn’t like. To which Stiles addresses, with as nimble and indignant a face as can replace his usual wild gesturing, exactly what he thinks of such accusations of his virtue, which by the way is as spotless as any royal maiden, which means that they _really_ shouldn’t be touching him if they knew what was good for themselves, but then again they probably didn’t because they were fleabitten sons of bitches, if you’ll excuse the pun -  
  
“We can gag him, though,” the straw-haired man says, before plugging Stiles’s mouth with a salty knotted rope that’s tied tersely behind his head.  
  
“You know,” the fist-happy one remarks, leaning above his face, “you’d better hope it’s not the Twelfth. He hates your kind. He’ll give you the treatment a little bitch like you deserves.” Which is a thought that apparently amuses him, because he grins and Stiles catches a glimpse of chipped yellowish fangs and a breath that’ll haunt his nightmares for days.  
  
They head out the door to throaty chuckles.  
  
But they leave, which is good enough for Stiles right now. Which is more than Stiles had hoped for, when the caravan was first sacked. He was the youngest of them in the town jail by a fair margin, most of the others bleary-eyed, scraggly-haired drunks whose throats were slashed on sight, perfunctorily, before they spotted him at the back. And dragged him out, stumbling, barefoot, into the stark white noon, where they said something in a language he couldn’t understand, but got the message quickly enough when they circled around him and smiled lewdly, tapping his legs apart with the flat side of their curved swords. They’d gripped his chin and slapped him until he opened his mouth, probably checking his teeth like a horse, and sliced off his wool trousers and underhose in neat pieces, groping at his bare buttocks in the frigid air while Stiles babbled senselessly in the four languages he knew (and one he made up) to keep the panic attack from building in his chest. One of them had slipped a rough finger under his thigh-length tunic to _that_ place between his legs, and he’d jumped, shocked, while they laughed and patted him on the ass, as if saying _good boy. Virgin._  
  
Scott has a _lot_ to answer for.  
  
Well, he couldn’t exactly blame it all on Scott. Or, well, anything on Scott. Considering Stiles was the one with the great idea to explore the caves in the first place: _It’s a feral, Scott! We’ll be badasses, Scott!_ Right. Why didn’t people realize the proper way to deal with his ideas was to lock him in the closet and taunt him with piping-hot, buttery biscuits until he came to his senses?  
  
He’d gotten Scott bit. There was no way around it. He’d prayed - oh man had he prayed - that the black thing was a dog, but Stiles was never that lucky, Stiles knew what it was soon as he saw the half-moon teethmarks on Scott’s trembling abdomen. But _he was going to make it better_. It was just - when he returned with the first aid kit and a plan to hide him from the soldiers, Scott was gone, and five days of desperate searching through the snow-blanketed forest didn’t come up with anything except increasingly numb feet for Stiles and the sight of claw marks on the sporadic tree.  
  
And a growing dread in Stiles’s stomach that the Argents had something to do with his best friend’s continued disappearance.  
  
It was weird for a village of their size to have anything to do with the Argent clan, the famous Hunter house that had served the General for six generations, but they weren’t far from the district capitol Calena and they’d been having problems for the last month with “terrorist elements” that everyone called feral werewolves out in the taverns, but behind the shutters of home knew that the only thing that _really_ piqued the interest of the State were rebels. Nobody Stiles knew had anything to do with them (and oh man would Stiles have loved to find out, at this rate the town would bore him to death before he graduated high school), but weeks ago he’d seen the scrunched wet flyers in the gutter, the scraps in the kindling near Market row - THE WAR IS A LIE; STAND UP TO FASCISM - and their teachers the next morning had made them recite the pledge in the cold, reminding them in sharp, sober voices to _come forward if you hear anything_. A few weeks later three of the Argents had come to little Beacon Hills with hefty fanfare and flag-waving through the freshly washed streets and set up in the mayor’s white-stone councilhouse, the gate suddenly perimetered by hedges of new guards who stood up straight and had real rifles.  
  
So - not the most ideal of conditions. But as his worry for Scott grew into real fear, Stiles had to do it: a bit of information-retrieving there.  
  
Well, he’d called it information-retrieving (which it was, honestly), but they’d called it _spying_ , and then they’d called it _stealing_. Seriously, State soldiers had no sense of humor. And so Stiles was locked up - very unfairly in his opinion, but nobody cared for the opinion of a 16-year-old delinquent - and then summarily shipped off with most of his jailmates to Calena for a proper sentencing, along with the year’s taxes, disguised as your typical uninteresting town caravan. Well that was real stupid, Stiles could’ve told them before this unhappy adventure, but they’d paid the price with their lives already, and god knows Stiles might have to pay with worse.  
  
 _Calm down_ , he tells himself, forcing slow his breath as the shadows on the ceiling above him float in and out; there’s a crack between the wall and the roof that lets in the light. You’ll get out of this. You’ll get back home. And then you’ll find Scott.  
  
He has to find Scott.  
  
But - what about his dad? It’s been nearly a week already; what if the sheriff’s panicking, what if he’s done something stupid ...?  
  
The door opens. The sudden cold air on his thighs makes him flinch.  
  
“Are you sure?” A high-pitched, limpid voice like a fork tapped on fine glass; like a child’s. A boy’s.  
  
“Yes,” another voice murmurs, a feminine one this time. “Don’t worry, he’ll be nicer-looking when clean.”  
  
When they approach the table, he sees that they’re nothing like the brutish werewolves who just manhandled him. They’re slender, young, though probably not much more so than Stiles; a blonde pair, delicate-boned, dressed in long-sleeved green tunics with embroidery at the hems and carrying a large bucket and a basket with something inside that tinkles like glass. Stiles is pitiful compared to the werewolves but he’s better built than this pair, after years of playfighting Scott in the fields; they don’t look like they could wrestle a puppy, much less work a till.  
  
Humans, Stiles thinks. Slaves.  
  
Bed slaves.  
  
Ignoring his wary gaze, they set their items down and then Stiles feels warm towels on his legs, scrubbing away at over a week’s worth of dirt and exhaustion and nervous sweat. He hates to admit it but it feels good; hell it feels _amazing_ , because Stiles is kind of a clean freak, who likes keeping his house and his hygiene in order more than most villagers (or men in general), except the circumstances this time haven’t exactly allowed for the luxury of coal-heated baths. They move upwards and untie the loincloth, which makes Stiles yelp and redden instantly - because seriously no female should be getting a close-up of that - but the towel’s touch between his legs is firm, clinical, and they rub his chest and arms with a soapy mixture. Then they slather his legs, every inch from hip to toe, with a cool layer of some sort of greenish paste, and then they reach over -  
  
“Whoa whoa whoa - wait.”  
  
“This is painless,” the girl says, calmly, right above his junk, where she’s applying the paste with a flat palette knife, and reaches in to sweep it in that narrow, deeply private strip behind his balls to his - hole.  
  
“Okay that’s _enough_ ,” Stiles says firmly, in his big-boy voice, but neither of them pay him attention as they leave the cooling paste and move up to wash his face, pouring water and something that smells embarrassingly like lilacs through his short brown hair.  
  
Shampoo. He’s hit the big leagues now.  
  
“I wish this was longer,” the boy says behind Stiles’s hair, a little crossly, before warm water rushes through his scalp. The girl shifts down to bend over his legs again, and with a small wooden scraper she begins to stroke the paste off onto the ground, rinsing the pink skin with a pitcher.  
  
She’s right. It is painless. Not that Stiles is any happier at the sight of _losing his hair._  
  
His very manly leg hair. Which he tells them, loudly.  
  
“The men like us smooth,” is what the girl says, soothingly, but that _definitely_ doesn’t comfort Stiles, though his bark’s a lot more menacing than his bite in this position. A large shadow fills the doorway - “raise him up”, the girl murmurs - and then suddenly the restraints on his ankles and wrists are being buckled off, and Stiles is being yanked up onto his feet by a frighteningly strong, severe grip - one of the werewolf guards, it has to be - and his aching wrists tugged behind his back to be corded together. The floor is freezing.  
  
The girl scrapes between his thighs. Stiles jerks. Bites his lip at the warning shake. He can see clumps of dark hair in the green paste on the ground.  
  
His back gets the same treatment as his front: scrubbed. Soaped. Rinsed. The girl takes out an unfamiliar contraption that looks like a red bottle with a long, thin hose. Without warning, she kneels down and nudges the tip of the hose inbetween his thighs up - _there_.  
  
Stiles reacts. Gets slapped on his buttocks for it, a sharp sting that only makes him squirm more, until the massive guard behind him snarls, the breath hot on Stiles’s neck.  
  
“There, there,” the boy pats his heaving flanks, apparently braver with an ally twice his size beside him, as the girl pumps a slippery liquid into him that slowly distends his lower stomach with the order to _hold it in_. It doesn’t hurt, not really, but it’s gruesome-looking, his stomach, it feels all - wrong -  
  
\- like they’re making his hole clean to _fuck_ -  
  
\- clean to _enjoy_ -  
  
“Push it out,” the girl says, after they forcibly rearrange him into a squatting position over an empty bucket that’s been placed in the corner. Stiles does so, bitterly, trying to swallow back the bile, feeling like a pampered whore that smells ludicrously of lilacs. The feeling grows worse when the boy - a child Stiles could eat for breakfast - pats him twice on the head, as if praising a prize cow, then rubs his entire body from neck to feet with a fragrant, glistening oil that leaves his skin feeling heated, numbed, like a layer of fat buffering him from the cold.  
  
The girl steps back, eyes skimming his face like a painting. The boy picks up a small, ornate box from his rush basket. From it he selects a vial no bigger than his palm and a slender brush.  
  
He steps forward.  
  
“No,” Stiles says.  
  
The boy hesitates. “But -”  
  
“No,” Stiles says. “I’ll eat it. And those things probably have lead in them, so try it too many times and you’ll have a dead human on your hands. And dead humans are less fuckable to your - _men_ , I’d think. I hope.”  
  
The boy glances at the girl. After a moment, she shrugs, a small motion, and he puts the lip paint back in the box.  
  
“Less is more for most males,” she tells him, like an instructor to her pupil. Though she can hardly be more than Stiles’s own sixteen. “He has good musculature and good health. His face is balanced. A little darkening of the eyes will be enough.”  
  
“And the Captain will not,” she says, “appreciate an over-elaborate appearance.”  
  
His eyes are, like she instructs, darkened with a kohl stick, quickly and efficiently. Stiles endures it, feeling the ominous shadow of the guard at his back, feeling very very glad that Scott isn’t here to see his face and store it in memory for future comebacks. And then it’s over, to his awful relief. The knocking on the door opens to more slaves: chest-bearers, broom-sweepers. He’s given shorts - real cotton shorts that cover most of his thighs, not a loincloth - and a soft tunic the color of a robin’s shell, and he thinks that the wardrobe’s a bit light for winter until they drape over him a heavy white fur cape that’s far more luxurious than anything Stiles has ever seen, much less owned.  
  
Not all of it is as palatable.  
  
“Hold, slave,” the guard growls, when Stiles wrenches his head away as if it’s a searing brand. With a twist of a key, the silver collar locks at the back of his neck.  
  
“Don’t get me wrong,” Stiles mutters, tugging at the cold thing around his neck. It holds. “I don’t like you either, Fluffy.”  
  
But the empty room doesn’t make him any calmer, after they leave. His thoughts, always something dangerous even in the most serene of times, fill up the bleak space, the floating shadows. He’s _fucked_ , Stiles thinks, clamping back the low moan. _Literally_. He’s barely sixteen, and his first time is going to be rape by some slobbering, savage beast. One of those shitty bastards, those _murderers_ -  
  
He’s not going to cry, though. He’s not. He’ll get over this, and then he’ll get home. To his dad. And to his best friend, somehow, even though it’s not’s looking good for him either.  
  
He’ll figure a way out of this.  
  
Stiles sits down and tucks his head between his knees, pulling the warm fur coat around him.  
  
  
***  
  
  
He’s woken by voices outside.  
  
“The Captain don’t want him,” the man is saying, rough-voiced. A werewolf.  
  
“At least take a look first, sir.”  
  
A clinking of armor, a shuffling of horse hooves. “It’s _no_ ,” a deeper, harder voice says, somewhere further off. “I’ve never taken one. I won’t start now.”  
  
A pause. There’s the feeling of protest, and yet, it hangs in the air without being given form. The horses move off, rumbling, as the sound of the camp grows. The werewolves are busy with some major communal activity, Stiles realizes. It doesn’t sound like their usual day-to-day routine, though god knows he has no idea what that is, or even _where_ he is; whether it’s even a camp. There’s laughter, warm-throated, good-natured. Cheers. The tromping of heavy boots. The rhythmic ringing of swords. Shouts that sound like barks.  
  
 _They really are dogs_ , Stiles thinks.  
  
“What’ll we do with the slave then?”  
  
“Don’t worry about it,” another one of them says. “The individual duels could do with a better prize.”  
  
  
***  
  
  
The individual duels.  
  
Stiles takes one look at the circle, at the werewolves standing around it, and reevaluates his earlier impression of them.  
  
They are worse than dogs.  
  
His bare feet - they hadn’t given him any shoes - had scrabbled over the frozen dirt as they’d dragged him forward by the chain they’d attached to his collar, another pair of werewolves and their casual swords at his back. The air was bitter, sharp in his lungs; this was the sort of winter in the lower borders of the Wolf lands, where there’s barely any snow except small tufts of white here and there but the cold’s a knife pricking at your nose. The few werewolves along their path had glanced at him, smirking, saying something in their guttural tongues, something offensive, which had made his attendants laugh back.  
  
In the distance, before he was yanked hard left into the festive square, he’d glimpsed the silhouette of towers rising above a grey smear in the reddish sunset. Something huge, something sprawling - a city. But this place, this moment was a military camp, lined with dune- and grass-colored tents in neat regular rows.  
  
A camp of werewolves.  
  
Brutish, violent animals, pretending to be men. Physical shapes that pack shoulder-to-shoulder in a noisy crowd around the outer ring of the circle, which has been drawn in red chalk and swept bare of snow and pebbles and grass, a tall wooden pole set in one end just on the chalk. They’re indistinguishable in their dirty leather and shorn hair, their faces as pale and grimy and dirt-smeared as Stiles remembered earlier; even more so, as if they’d been tussling in mud like pigs all day. They grin, whoop, gulp flasks the size of Stiles’s head that they dump carelessly on the ground and toss pouches that jangle of coin. Gambling. The jostling for choice places up front looks aggressive, without drawing blood; to his wide eyes none of these soldiers appear armed, or even armored, as if they’re off-duty. Some of them lunge forward, a nipping motion, but it appears playful, it gets a shove to the face and a teeth-baring laugh. The air is sour with fermented beer and - excitement. Intent.  
  
Stliles’s village was a tame little place in the bosom of a native forest; that’s why he and his dad had picked it in the first place, after the city fell with his mom’s grave inside it. Stiles has never been among soldiers, much less the furry kind. He has a bad feeling he’s not going to like this experience.  
  
They shove him into the crowd, towards the pole. Crude hands paw at him, pinch him in painfully tender places beneath the cloak; shouts of “not bad!” “I’m fucking horny already!” follow him as they bind him to the wooden pole with a coarse rope, the fur cloak untied to drop to the ground beside his feet. His body is now exposed. It’s freezing, but he barely feels it, not with the blood rushing through his awkwardly tied limbs, his heart thumping like a rabbit’s in his ears.  
  
“Men,” one of them announces, grandly, with a hearty clasp on his bare thigh, “the prize this evening is this pretty little thing to fuck any way you wish. A tight virgin, I hear. So I want to see _some fucking blood tonight_!” Which rouses a roar, and Stiles’s heart begins pumping impossibly loud, quick, as his breath seizes, and he has to bite his lip to fight it, fight the panic, the clenching fear in his chest.  
  
Something has been flung into the circle.  
  
A gauntlet, leather. Followed by a man.  
  
And another. A werewolf duel, Stiles now sees, is not one executed with steel, with fluent parries and feints of skill. A werewolf duel is fought with fangs and claws and raw intimidation, the brawny combatants circling each other warily caged in a wall of goads and cheers, before engaging with shocking speed - a blur of lunging muscle and jaw far faster, far crueler than anything Stiles has ever seen, clashing flesh and bone with animal growls. Barefoot, panting, they back off in anticipation of the next strike, hands dark to the wrists with blood, thin shirts torn in places to bare the sweating, grimy skin. The ground is already splotched with dark red. To Stiles’s amazement, the bleeding wound on the werewolf whose back is turned to him closes up before Stiles’s eyes.  
  
The healing ability. He’s heard of this before, but it was only a distant fanciful thing, not - reality.  
  
 _You want to penetrate deep_ , he remembers one of the merchants saying, who’d traveled widely and saw the sort of worldly things that’d fascinate a pair of young boys. _They won’t even notice a shallow hit, but they can choke, they can drown, they can be gutted on a stick..._  
  
It’s a fight of attrition. With both healing every second, they pause only barely before trying to grapple the other to the ground through sheer strength, and score enough damage with fangs and claw to prevent him from getting up; from healing quickly enough to staunch the successive wounds as they are made. It’s a raw fight, a fight of beasts. A sudden cheer seems to mark the end of it - the one lying on the far side of the ring, his upper half drenched in red, raises a shallow hand, and the one standing over him gets claps on his back and flasks raised in salute. Stiles swallows.  
  
But it’s not over. Another gauntlet tumbles into the center, another werewolf prodded in to the clapping of his comrades. It’s a fight with the victor, which Stiles would find slightly unfair given their relative freshness, but he doesn’t feel particularly sympathetic to any of these brutes right now. The new guy is a half head taller but lankier, and he wins this round, and the next.  
  
But his crown is taken in the next match, by a swifter, more agile wolf who likes to sweep the ankles. It continues. More goading. More groans, cheers, bickering over coin. The ground within the red chalk is now a dark red puddle. The blood soaks the soil beneath Stiles’s feet and he tries to scrape it off on the rough pole.  
  
It’s a huge one in the circle this time, not so tall but twice as wide as Stiles, built like a bulldog, scarred, without a neck. He seems to be popular, at least in the bets, because there’s a massive cheer when he lifts his struggling opponent up above his head and smashes him onto the ground, with this, _crunching_ noise that makes Stiles flinch. He leaps on him like a rabid animal but the broken bones are apparently enough to make his opponent hastily raise a hand.  
  
He beats his next opponent with a pummeling to the stomach and a blow to the ear that makes the werewolf hack black blood and teeth. He breaks the next challenger’s jaw, and probably cracks his kneecap. His claws slices another’s thumbs clean off, which makes Stiles yank his gaze to the ground, the wild cheers surging around him, and his stomach revolt even though there’s nothing in it, and no way to heave when he’s bound so tight.  
  
The crowd is quieting.  
  
“Is there anyone willing to challenge Harkon?”  
  
A murmur, but it’s directed to the massive Harkon, who is already taking congratulations, his ragged shirt drenched in beer.  
  
“Very well then” - a nod to the men flanking Stiles, who cut off the ropes with small daggers, and then Stiles is stumbling forward with a blunt prod to his back, clutching his trembling wrists - “I pronounce Harkon victor, and may he enjoy his prize -”  
  
“Wait,” Stiles protests, and he can’t believe what he’s doing, but he can’t just - _shit_. Harkon’s _huge_. The werewolf would - rip him in half -  
  
They’re glancing at him, running their eyes over him. Smirking.  
  
Stiles shifts. “I mean. Don’t I get to challenge too?”  
  
A pause, before the air erupts into guffaws. They can’t believe him, of course; Stiles can barely believe himself. Someone yells out, “give your little filly a go, Harkon!” And Harkon turns around slow with a grin on his face, sharp-fanged, as he saunters forward leisurely, letting his gleaming dark eyes roam Stiles’s waist with obvious intent. Judging by his brusque, tanned face he looks seasoned, a man of at least forty winters, but clearly still with the vigor of youth; his huge arms, crisscrossed with white scars, are practically the width of Stiles’s legs and Stiles can’t help but step back, breathing hard, mindful of the hostile rows of men behind him; though there’s something else in the gathering now too, something depraved, something _eager_.  
  
Shit. He’d just wanted to buy some time, any time, but as his usual his mouth was a rather important second ahead of his brain.  
  
“Pretty thing,” Harkon grins wide, spreading his broad hands, “I don’t mind a show. If your cunthole’s as tight as they claim, and you spread like a good boy, I might even be gentle.”  
  
A show. Now this really gets them worked up, and Harkon shows the audience his hands, how he’s withdrawn his claws. Harkon’s going to toy with him, Stiles thinks sickly. But isn’t that what Stiles is, a pathetically defenseless puppy, who’s dressed like a fuckboy with his thighs showing and the collar and chain still dangling down his neck, skin still warm and oily from their rose-infused bear grease. In the village he’d never even seen a real whore before, just riffed jokes off the rumors of the red quarter like any other painfully virginal village boy, so he can’t even - believe this is happening, seriously, thank fucking god his dad can’t see him now -  
  
 _Breathe, Stiles. Breathe._  
  
He’s never even gotten in a fight before. Not a real one. People in the village liked Stiles, or humored him at least. The boys ignored him, he was so low on the totem pole. The girls thought he was “cute”, which meant they couldn’t remember his name, but liked the spice cookies the sheriff’s boy was getting famous for.  
  
He’d rough-and-tumble-it with Scott all the time, but Scott was Scott, Scott was human, not some monster with incredibly _not human_ speed and strength -  
  
He barely avoids the swipe by sidestepping out of the way, but almost stumbles on his ass, which accomplishes a stinging palm and laughter. And plenty of notes about how eager the boy is to get on his back.  
  
“Ha ha,” Stiles mutters, wiping his cheek.  
  
Harkon is moving exaggeratedly slow, play-lunging at him, indulging in the audience’s catcalling, scoring innocent taps that make Stiles twist around in panic. Stiles has no chance; he’s seen how this man deals with full-grown werewolves, real fighters, and the lurid memory’s enough to keep the blood roaring in his ears, make him look around wildly for an exit even though he’s surrounded by a wall of roused grins on all sides. Harkon’s methodical shadow presses his heels back into the circle border, the red chalk, and he’s prodded forward by cheerful hands that also take the opportunity to feel his ass, swat at the long chain he’s clutching in his hand to keep out of Harkon’s reach.  
  
Harkon grasps at his arm - slips - it’s the oil -  
  
“Seriously can’t we just, like, talk this out,” Stiles holds his hands up nervously, tracking a wide circle, keeping his front to the werewolf. “I’m miserable in bed, I’m not even attractive, I ramble too much and -” With a yelp, his back’s hit something abrupt; hard. His fingers scrabble at it. The pole.  
  
Enjoying himself, Harkon’s eyes narrow, and he plunges forward like a fevered bull -  
  
Stiles ducks, twists - flings the chain around with such panicked force it circles back twice round the pole, and he grabs the end of it and _yanks_ -  
  
Harkon’s hands jerk up to his thick neck, where the chain’s digging into the skin, into the scruff of his beard, as a growl erupts low in his chest like some outraged beast to break out in a harsh strangled breath - and _holy shit_ they’re really getting into it now, they’re yelling and laughing and crowding into them to get a better look and Stiles is just pulling and pulling as hard as he can, the desperation coursing strength through his arms -  
  
Harkon lifts and smashes his clawed foot into Stiles’s left thigh.  
  
The bright burst of agony is so shocking Stiles stumbles back at the blow, like it’s cracked his legbone, there’s gaping _chunks_ above his knee from Harkon’s sawlike claws. But then he has far, far worse things to worry about, because the chain’s loose, because a breath-ripping weight’s crashed into his flank, pinning him onto the hard damp ground like a violent stake through his center, his vision exploding in dizzy white tendrils - Harkon, furious. Enraged.  
  
His neck, the sweltering red imprint of the chain like blisters on his skin. _Oh fuck._ Gasping Stiles tries to turn his cheek but Harkon wrenches it back with one brutal grip, trapping Stiles’s hips, bringing his face so close Stiles can feel the breath coming in hot foetid pants. Harkon’s black eyes are wild, pupil-less.  
  
 _Ohgodohgodohgod -_  
  
“Little bitch,” the werewolf snarls, “I was going to be soft on you. But it looks like you deserve a dry fuck. And I’ll invite the others to have a go too, so your guts’ll be hanging out your hole by the end of tonight.”  
  
“But a beating first,” he says, lips pulling back, “I like my meat tender” - and Stiles chokes as his stomach recoils in hurt from the staggering blow, his vision shuddering, and then the fists are bashing at his face, his jaw -  
  
But then it’s - off. Abruptly, the blows stop; Harkon’s pausing. Through his cringing, swaying field of sight - there’s blood leaking down his right eye, the skin’s been cracked - Stiles realizes that the werewolf’s looking at something beyond his face, something in the center of the circle.  
  
A gauntlet.  
  
A confused murmur ripples through the onlookers. There’s a small commotion at the far end, where a knot of men have gathered; then, suddenly, they’re jostling back, out of the way, as if wanting to give it space.  
  
The whisper grows, incredulous -  
  
“The captain?”  
  
“It can’t be -”  
  
A man’s striding forward, picking up the gauntlet; dusting it, before sliding it on his left hand. He’s young-looking, Stiles makes out from the weary periphery of his eyes, and clean in brown leathers and a simple black shirt. It makes him stand out: no mud, no dirt. Dark-haired, rough-shaven.  
  
His face is - Hard. Stony. It looks unkind. There’s no expression on it while he peers almost idly at the gauntlet that he’s fastening with the other hand.  
  
“I - Captain, we thought you weren’t interested -”  
  
The man’s gaze seems to flicker up, and that’s enough to silence them. Harkon has shoved off Stiles’s hips in one brusque movement and is now approaching this new werewolf at a deliberate amble, but there’s a slight stutter in it, Stiles thinks tiredly, like Harkon’s uneasy, like he’s playing at bravado. Stiles forces himself up on his side with an aching elbow, breath still trembling, raising shaky fingers to touch his cheek. It hurts. His eye’ll be mottled tomorrow. His nose is tender but miraculously, nothing feels broken. His head is still ringing; everything is over-bright, over-saturated, and he can’t focus, the scene’s blurring at the edges, the onlookers a dark, shapeless mass in the dusk.  
  
The man’s still standing in his place, at ease. But even though he’s well-built, much broader in the shoulders than Stiles, and equally as tall as Harkon, he’s nowhere near Harkon’s sheer bulk, and doesn’t look anywhere near his savagery, not with those clean hands.  
  
“Captain,” Harkon says, light-heartedly, “I must say I’m honored to see your challenge. You don’t usually - join us in such things.”  
  
“I don’t.” The man’s voice is flat. “But I was so unimpressed with your left hook, I had to step in.”  
  
Stiles blinks. A moment ago, the man had been in front of Harkon, near the circle center; but now he’s standing behind him, glancing back at Harkon’s broad back.  
  
Blood starts spurting out the side of Harkon’s neck like a fountain.  
  
“Allowing a young boy to gain an advantage over you,” the man says, tonelessly, as if discussing the weather, “Is that the conduct of a soldier in the royal army?”  
  
Before moving forward, one sleek dark thrust, and _oh god_ that’s Harkon’s massive arm dangling at a wrong angle, incongruous with his tensed body, and the whole arena halts - Harkon’s struck dumb, just staring at it, open-mouthed - before the senses rush back and he _howls_ -  
  
Wide-eyed, caught in this terse, compact passage of violence, Stiles doesn’t notice until it’s too late. Until he’s being lifted, roughly, like a sack of potatoes, and thrown over the man’s shoulder, the blood-soaked ground veering beneath his eyes. His bruised stomach lurches; his vision sinks in and out in black depressions. He’s so weak, his mouth dry and throbbing where his teeth bit into the cheek, he can’t even - protest -  
  
The ground shifts. Harkon has gotten back up; Stiles can hear his harsh, erratic breathing somewhere close. The hulking werewolf must be - senseless now, _enraged_ -  
  
“Keep going,” the man says, “and I’ll cut off your arm and raise it for you.”  
  
A scuffling; they’re pulling Harkon back, letting him shove into the crowd like a staggering boar.  
  
The ground teeters. Stiles can feel the lines swell in murmur, part, give them space as the man walks out with his captive - his prize - draped over his shoulder. Stiles tries to lift his head to see where he’s being taken; an open path, a pale row of tents, steeped in the soft blue of twilight. The nicker of horses. The quiet lull of at-ease flags, red emblemed, beside each tent; the number 12, inscribed on each.  
  
Someone says, “Apologies, Captain. We thought you didn’t like humans.”  
  
“I don’t,” the man says.  
  
  
***  
  
  
The Captain’s tent is no larger than the rest.  
  
The werewolf doesn’t drop him down at the dark entrance. He lights a lantern with his other hand first, and Stiles sees an austere space illuminated - a pallet in the corner, a wool blanket, a pair of large wooden chests, a writing table with a basket of apples on it - not quite the opulent furs and silks he would’ve assumed a commander of barbarians enjoyed - before he finds himself curtly deposited on the hard ground, his white fur coat thrown on him, the werewolf pulling his chain around one of the tent poles, fastening it with a padlock.  
  
Stiles scrambles up, backing away. But there’s little room; his back presses against the tent. His bruises are aching. The man isn’t looking at him.  
  
“Just so you know,” Stiles breathes, “If you’re going to fuck me. I’ll fight. Well, I - I probably won’t do much damage, so don’t bother laughing, but - I can bite. I’ll bite all over you, and then I’ll - I’ll bite myself. So I’ll bleed all over you and your fancy tent.”  
  
Silence.  
  
“I’m not afraid of you,” Stiles says.  
  
The man doesn’t look up. He’s - bigger than Stiles. Much bigger. His shoulders fill up the breadth of the tent. He’s bending down to take something out of a satchel, something he tosses at Stiles’s feet. A thick loaf of bread, half the length of Stiles’s forearm.  
  
“Eat,” the man says, tersely, with the briefest of glances. “You can also have the apples.” And then he’s out, the tent entrance flapping.  
  
Stiles is left grasping.  
  
He stares at the entrance for a long, tense moment, body frozen in place, not sure whether the surge of warmth in his chest is relief or - or delayed _terror_ , before collapsing bonelessly onto the thick fur cape. He lies there for a hollow moment, too exhausted to move; listens to his heart echoing in the empty tent, watches the lantern light flicker on the cuts on his hand. A moment later, pushing past his arms’ protestations, he does tug at the cold chain, which is obviously useless. As is the padlock. Stiles had watched; the man had taken the key with him.  
  
And besides - there’s the growing noise of soldiers, outside. Even if Stiles could escape from this tent, he’d wouldn’t make it an inch before others dragged him back.  
  
The pain is ebbing, slightly, so long as he doesn’t move. His whole body is sore, but he’s not grievously hurt. He’ll live.  
  
Until the werewolf - _the Captain_ \- comes back. Maybe. He’d just humiliated a werewolf twice his size like he was peeling an orange, it was that hard; what would he do with Stiles? What could Stiles do against him? And he didn’t exactly seem happy with his prize either. Stiles was beginning to realize that this must be the captain the voices outside his cell had been talking about; the one who’d rejected him.  
  
Stiles’s stomach is squirming. He hasn’t eaten for the last two days, though they’ve given him water, in a bowl like you’d use for a dog. The bread the werewolf tossed him isn’t fresh, it looks hard, but -  
  
No.  
  
“Fuck him,” Stiles mutters. He won’t obey a werewolf. If this rapist wants him to _spread_ like a _good boy_ , he has other things coming.  
  
Stiles curls up under the thick coat, pushing the bread behind him.  
  
  
***  
  
  
Derek doesn’t know why he did it.  
  
The small carving in his hand’s beginning to show suggestions of wear in the moonlight; the black tip of the fox’s nose is fading, the paint on its red tail scraped in places. He wraps the cloth back around it, puts it back in the satchel. The soft neighs of the horses greet him as he walks past.  
  
He still has - bad habits. Sometimes, his sword arm’s faster than his head.  
  
Especially on these nights, when the moon’s two days before fullness. Many werewolves will act rashly the closer it gets; that’s why Derek’s even stricter in training, why he’ll demand they repeat the same parry over and over again, drilling the discipline in them, drilling the control in them, under the most tempting of moons.  
  
But it’s not that.  
  
Derek stops at the pebbled edge of the shallow brook. In the water he sees it, as it was in his mind: the human boy, standing there, his mouth trembling, defiant. A thin rivulet of blood glistening down his brow, his cheek, the kohl of his eyes smudged wet. Derek hadn’t meant to look at the duels but somehow his gaze had caught, had snagged, and somewhere it had shifted, the scene, into another arena: into the harsh ringing of steel, the black smoke of the towers, the pressing of the soldiers and the lash of their yells on all sides around them, as they ran for the river.  
  
It must have been that. It must have been the memory of that night, the grip of the blade, Derek still just eleven years old, turning to face the humans, the towering silhouette of their pikes against the flaming night sky; to his back, the quiet river, Laura dragging him in by the ankle, just before the arrows began to plunge into the water. The moments after, he still can’t remember; when he came to, his cheeks were dry, the lanterns were floating on the river, and they were on the other side.  
  
It must have been this slip, a vision that found this crack. The echo of fear; the retort of pride. Given space for his mind to catch up, he would’ve pulled himself back, remembered that this was a human, not something to blur oneself with. Remembered that he had neither desire nor room for such a creature in his life. Remembered the vow he’d made that same night: that the next humans he saw would be met by his blade, and nothing else.  
  
He’ll live with the consequences, Derek thinks. He’ll have to. A slave can be trained to be silent like any backyard barn dog. The rumor will have flown to the keep by now, to Lord Whittemore’s own bedchambers, so it’s too late to get rid but the boy can be made to be inconspicuous, to stay in his own corner, like a decorative vase or a pretty figurine. He won’t affect Derek’s life in any way, not if he knows what’s good for him.  
  
Derek watches the moon shatter, reform on the water. Fourteen years, and the guilt still hasn’t left him.

 


	2. Names and No Names

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Any slave can be made to be inconspicuous, to stay in his own corner, like a decorative vase or a pretty figurine."
> 
> Derek has never met Stiles Stilinski.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So sorry for the slow update! I've had some serious (positive ;P) RL issues that required me to be out traveling for the last month. 
> 
> However, this chapter is 21k+ words, so although it's very slow-moving and consists mainly of worldbuilding, it's still the size of three of my usual chapters. XD
> 
> Be warned that DEREK IS A REAL ASSHAT HERE, in an attempt to translate the beginning of their relationship in canon (think the 'intimidation tactics' Derek of S1, who thrusts Stiles into a wall, threatens to rip his throat out, and slams his head into the dashboard, rather than the guy who can joke with Stiles as they lie paralyzed on the ground). And being a slave brings out a few of Stiles's less-noble qualities, though the frustrating circumstances certainly don't help. :P
> 
> Lastly, as you can tell from the title - pay attention to names in this chapter...

_You’d better hope it’s not the Twelfth_ , the werewolf had said.  
  
It’s the clinking sound of armed guards shifting outside the tent, a murmured “hello, Captain” that gives him the briefest of alarms to wake up and snap upright, the warm weight of the fur coat spilled around his waist, before the tent entrance abruptly slaps open like a trick of the wind.  
  
Stiles takes one look at the dark figure who’s suddenly stilled at the entrance way, face shadowed where the lantern light can’t reach, and remembers that this man  _broke a massive werewolf’s arm in half_.  
  
Before threatening to rip it off. For not beating the crap out of Stiles as easily as any big bad rapist furball worth his hilariously prodigious biceps should’ve. Of course. Though luckily for Stiles, the night’s spared him the werewolf’s facial expression, so the prospective combination of “murderous” with “rapey” on a violent beast in human skin doesn’t make him pee himself.  
  
Yet.  
  
They stare at each other.  
  
The night air’s ruptured the warmth of the tent. There are several things that Stiles is acutely aware of right now, little bits and pieces of the world shimmering like overbright shards on the thick grey stream of his consciousness: his breathing; the languid weight of the silver chain around his neck; the fact that _he’s back_ , and - and Stiles is the dolled-up prize he’s just won, and it’s night. Every exhausted twinge in his body going _hide hide hide_ ; a stupider, louder part that’s seized him by the back of his neck and whispering _don’t move, stay still, maybe it won’t see you. Ya dumbass._  
  
The new element in the cold winter air his lungs are gulping down, so brittle it feels poised to break at the slightest of taps: sudden hostility, filling the far corners of the tent like the draft.  
  
Stiles is so, so fucked.  
  
“I take it,” the man speaks, finally, in a commanding voice that saunters like a blade held up to the tender skin of Stiles’s throat, “that bread is no longer good enough for humans.”  
  
Stiles blinks.  
  
“I,” he stares. Stops. “Wait. Bread?”  
  
The man drops the tent flap behind him.  
  
Somehow, Stiles manages to not shrink back in reflex. Somehow, Stiles yanks back in time the humiliatingly vigorous urge to duck his head under the fur coat and curl into himself like a cowering hedgehog with soft, yummy skin for quills. No one’s ever said the Stilinskis don’t have their pride. _Hard-headed, more like_ ; but still.  
  
Stiles pushes his hand under the fur coat; clamps it on his ankle so tight the trembling’s squelched. His fingers are icy.  
  
 _Holy crap._ The mad rush of the first encounter - a dumping on the ground, the man’s back to him, Stiles scrambling for words to fling, heart pumping so loud the memory is engulfed by it - was so brief it now feels like a distant dream that tore past without a trace. Not this time. This time, Stiles’s heart has had hours to exhaust itself, and the semi-mythical logical part of his brain is back in the saddle, pointing out the fairly damning physical facts. None of which favor Stiles. Or the intelligence of wielding verbal insults against a man who can apparently puncture a throat faster than Stiles can drag himself upright to gawk.  
  
Then again, nothing’s favored him since he dragged Scott with him to the caves.  
  
 _Okay, so he’s just - standing there. Like a wall. A wall of muscle. On top of - uh, more muscle. Great._ The closer look’s not exactly thrilling - the ring was enough, thanks, and he’s pretty intimatedly acquainted with those shoulders, which are either insanely broad or several days of foodlessness have turned Stiles into a twig - but it’s getting harder to avoid now that the dizziness’s deserted him and _the werewolf’s_ _standing right there in front of him._ (Not that Stiles is terrified or anything, just - they could do with a bigger tent.)  
  
When Stiles looks, though - really _looks_ \- the guy’s obviously built like a brickhouse, yeah, under that crisp black shirt, but Stiles’s mind must have enlarged him like the Nightmare Who Stole Yuletide in his memory because he actually looks plausibly human-sized here, and not so I Can Swallow Ten Children Whole. Young-looking, Stiles thinks, skimming the face quickly like a fisherman’s net swept over water. Maybe mid-twenties. But hard-looking, like a man who grew up in war (and not Stiles’s war, but the other side of it, the other end of the pike), roughshaven and cut sharp around the edges with the clean angles and the precise musculature of a young man in his prime, rather than the grime and the bearish layers of fat and brawn of the other assholes who’d manhandled him earlier.  
  
But there’s something _different_ about him, different from those other werewolves beyond the apparent fact he bathes. Something about the way the man holds himself - more of a vibe, actually, like a faint thrum at the distant periphery of a spider’s web. Which might be the wind, or a fly, or - something else. Stiles frowns inwardly, but he must’ve been gaping for, like, seconds already, and instantly it jolts him out: the bright sheen of the man’s leather boots in the low light. The grain lying there at his feet, innocent.  
  
“Oh. That bread,” Stiles breathes out. Drags his eyes up to track the man’s gloved hands, which are paused loosely by his side - by the sheathed length of his sword - though it’s not like the man’s twitching enough for a pulse. Or like there’s enough room here to crawl, much less run.  
  
Though - the thin pallet’s close. Within the chain’s reach, if - if his head were positioned at the bottom.  
  
“Yeah, well, guess I’m on a diet,” Stiles bites out, lifting his eyes up to the werewolf’s.  
  
Forget Stilinski. Stiles was _born_ to be named Instant Regret.  
  
The man’s - fucking _furious_. It’s hard to explain but there’s no other word for it, even though he isn’t frowning, even though his mouth isn’t tight, the eyebrows impassive, slack enough to be taken as bored. Even though the dark eyes that meet Stiles’s own are calm, cool and flinty in a face that gives away nothing. But if it’s nowhere in his expression, it’s everywhere else: an _anger_ palpating in the small trapped space of this tent. A kind of _resentment_ that’s vibrating in the thick air pressing against Stiles’s body, against the bruises, like it’s trying to shove him back.  
  
 _He hates your kind._ It’s difficult and Stiles swallows too loudly, too obviously, but holds steady his end of the taut line between their gazes.  
  
Hey, he’s a Stilinski. Pigheaded in the face of terror is part of the territory.  
  
But. Stiles - Stiles’s no fighter. Stiles is the over-mothering cook to Papa Stilinski’s Only Sheriff in Town. Stiles is the kid who lasted a village record _six days_ of the mandatory military training with the rest of the boys before they tossed him out for “mental health reasons”, the apparent codephrase for “annoying, distracting, and about as trainable as a retarded squirrel”. Stiles is an experienced pragmatist who likes to think he actually has a _highly_ developed instinct for self-preservation, especially at the feet of a creature that could shred him to bitesized pieces with a fingernail (though yeah, this kinda wars with his better-known habit of finding pits, and then digging himself deeper into them). Stiles, in fact, should really be shutting up right about now because there’s a mine here, somewhere, in this little tent, and he is _not_ going to antagonize this guy just because he’s so - sick and, and _exhausted_ of these assholes who’ve been groping his ass like a prize piece of meat and killing like it’s nothing -  
  
Stiles, with a painfully obvious attempt at a shrug:  
  
“A _not-eating-my-rapist’s-rapity-food_ diet. I mean, nothing against you, personally - a lot of people call me way too picky about my tastes, and uh, the crinkly forehead thing you guys get? Yeah - kind of a no-no. Sorry.”  
  
Oh hey, this guy doesn’t even have to beat him. Stiles has this nifty little thing called an _internal flinch_ that can do all the Stiles-kicking for him.  
  
An almost incredulous pause. Before -  
  
“Rapist?” The man sounds amused, rolling his tongue around it like it’s a foreign word. The step forward he takes is deliberate, boots heavy and black, right to the border of the soft fur coat puddled around Stiles’s legs and this time, (stupid, _stupid_ ) Stiles edges back, eyes huge, feeling the tent fabric resist around his shoulders.  
  
The man drawls, “I haven’t done anything to you - yet - except give you food and shelter from the cold. That’s substantially better than I treat new recruits.”  
  
“And as for your _tastes_ ,” he presses forward with casual, predatory ease, as Stiles hastily tucks his legs in, and in the flickering orange light Stiles catches the glint of fangs, the outline of a mild eyebrow-arching smirk:  
  
“I don’t see where they enter this equation, _slave_. When I tell you to eat, _you eat_. When I tell you to sleep, _you sleep_. When I tell you to shut up, you -”  
  
“Offer the easier solution of just shooing me back across the border?”  
  
The man levels him a flat look.  
  
“I mean, uh, laugh nervously,” Stiles says, weakly. “And then hate myself. Right. Got it. Did I mention that I’m also kinda slow picking up on the obvious. Oh, hey - more reasons to get of me.”  
  
The movement’s so swift Stiles doesn’t even have the time to startle properly: in the next breath, the man’s crouched down in front of his face, so close Stiles is now gulping in the surreal arc of a werewolf’s eyelashes (surprisingly pretty, actually), the tanned slope of the neck, the darkened wet fringe of the black shirt collar like there’s been a recent heavy sweat.  
  
Up close, the werewolf almost looks human: dark-haired, relaxed, built of solid muscle but not quite Harkon in either the size or the brutality of his forearms. Up close, the werewolf’s actually breathing, like a living breathing thing, and he has a nick, an old scar, by his left ear.  
  
Stiles looks at the easy breadth of those shoulders and thinks, _you broke a guy's arm in half to teach him a lesson_.  
  
But. Yeah. No worries, Stiles can take him. Stiles has been doing this whole exercise thing where he chases Scott up trees to make him do his fair share of the homework. So - leg muscles. Leg muscles everywhere. And, if you squint, Stiles almost has abs too (well, for an underfed sixteen year old boy), and he’s pretty good with a stick, even if that’s mainly to save his cabbage patch from Mrs. Caldwell’s sneaky pigs. Stiles can totally take this guy.  
  
Like a ball of string takes on a tiger.  
  
Stiles swallows.  
  
“If I got rid of you, _slave_ ,” the man says, one dark eyebrow raised, so close the words tap Stiles’s cheek like the flat edge of a blade, “it’d be in a ditch. Within these borders.”  
  
“Oh. Okay,” Stiles breathes. Worries his lip. “Well, it’s good to know some things early in a relationship.”  
  
“Then remember _this_.” In the same blunt, humorless tone. “Rule number one: I talk, you listen. And then you obey. It’s a one-way deal, no allowance for chitchat.”  
  
“Rule number two,” the man drawls. “There is no rule number two.”  
  
 _And then you obey._  
  
Frozen, the hair on the back of Stiles’s neck flickers to the pallet.  
  
The werewolf’s hands are somewhere very, very close. Not touching. Maybe touching. Stiles would scramble to find them if he could look down.  
  
If he weren’t - preoccupied. Because from this distance the eyes aren’t as toneless black as they look in the shadow, but an intense, glinting olive that’s wrenching Stiles’s own to them like a chain, like a short, sharp command.  
  
Eyes that’re straining under their cool gleam with something that looks like - distaste.  
  
Disdain.  
  
“Something the matter?” the man, brusquely.  
  
Stiles bites his lip. Shakes his head. He can only imagine this guy’s reaction if he started talking about his eyes.  
  
“Good. You’re learning.” Not that a glimmer of approval enters his voice. “I’ll make this easy for you - my default command is _shut up_. If I want anything else, I’ll say it.”  
  
“Oh. Cool. Er, might I suggest investing in gags stock.”  
  
The same hostile look. Underscored by the hint of a growl. _Nooo_ , Stiles wants to explain, it’s the nerves, if Captain Asshole would just _back off_ and give him a bit of personal space and not be so casually broad-shouldered and _twice-his-size_ with those gloved hands relaxed so close to Stiles’s waist promising imminent and continual rape or torture or whatever fucking else werewolves do to their slaves then maybe Stiles’s mouth-to-brain filter will come back and he’ll stop flailing around all these horrible thoughts that float up to his humming gear-muncher of a brain -  
  
With a jerk of the chain, Stiles finds himself pinned in the man’s hard stare again.  
  
The deadpan grazes Stiles’s skin like rough stone. “You must think you’re cute.”  
  
“Um. Not really? Considering I’ve never had a date,” Stiles, faintly. Before adding quickly, eyes widening: “Not that I’m a virgin. _At all._ I mean, I’ve - I’ve done loads of guys. _Loads._ No new territory left to explore here, I mean this ol’ body’s been so thoroughly deflowered it’s like a - a flower massacre up here -”  
  
“If you don’t _shut up_ , you’ll have another kind of massacre to worry about.”  
  
Pause.  
  
"I - " Stiles’s face scrunches. “Wait, that doesn’t even make any sense -”  
  
Oops, the Glare again. Pretty effective, actually. Stiles’s mouth snaps shut.  
  
 _Fantastic_. Who knew being a dick to your own men probably doesn’t bode well for the enemy slave you’ve caveman-lugged to your tent? It’s starting to become sparklingly clear that not only is this guy a violent asshole who can shred Stiles to pieces like a potato peeler, he’s a violent asshole who can shred Stiles to pieces like a potato peeler _with a lovely personality to boot._  
  
Despite the chill the delicate layer of air between them feels hot; compressed. The guy’s looming so close Stiles can practically feel the rough stubble on his jaw, the tension in it. If Stiles actually breathes, lets his chest rise and fall behind the shelter of his knees then something might - move, might accidentally touch. Though the look the man’s giving him is decidedly unromantic. Unless trying to spear Stiles to the tent wall counts.  
  
“I see you’re either insolent, or stupid. I don’t care for either - not in my men, not in my slaves,” the man says.  
  
“Keep up the lip,” the man says, roughly, “and I’ll take the rod to your back and _make you_ heel.”  
  
Stiles stares.  
  
Closes his eyes. Takes a shallow, shaky breath. After a moment, flatly:  
  
“Okay, that is _really_ not helping.”  
  
Lifting his chin, glaring back, the words rushing out in a painful heat before he can pull them back:  
  
“Look, I know what you won me for, _you asshole_. All I can say is - good luck waving your dick near my teeth. So go ahead, get off on beating me all you want because I am _not_ going to crawl into your freakin’ rape cave like a _meek little slave_ -”  
  
“Shut up," the man says.  
  
Huh. On second thought, maybe Stiles was a bit unfair on those arms. Up close, it’s easier to see there’s enough biceps there to overthrow a small government.  
  
The thing is, up close, in the soft contours of the lantern light, the guy might almost be called handsome (if Stiles were feeling more charitable, which - ha! is never going to happen). He’s young and rugged-looking, intense, the sort of _tall, dark, and handsome_ that’d send Stiles’s female classmates into spurtive fits of giggles and furious glancing. He doesn’t even look all that grunting-caveman-eager-to-mount right now like Harkon and the other werewolves - just hard and arrogant, letting out a hint of a fang, a swordsman version of your typical sweaty-palmed beast. But there’s a repressed violence to his face, to the idle span of those shoulders, a harshness in it as stark and stripped-bare as this tent that repulses Stiles on instinct.  
  
The thing is, it’s still brutality, even if it comes in a better-looking package. Stiles knows this type. Stiles’s seen it before in the smooth-eyed, easy-strolling guys his dad used to take in, handcuffed, sitting them down with a rough hand on their shoulders. Guys who people’d admire for their prestigious positions and good looks and ambiguous connections in State Security, all while they’d be hitting their wives, beating the crap out of their kids at home.  
  
There’s people who make mistakes, and then there’s these guys. The type that are fucking _cruel_. Who not only don’t care, but can’t see why they ought to.  
  
“I don’t give a fuck what you want,” the man says, as he gets up without a backwards glance, snuffing the lantern on the writing table on his way to the pallet. “You’ll do as I say if you like the skin on your back. If you don’t think you’re a slave, you’re welcome to throw your gauntlet at my feet. Though I doubt you’ll like the result.”  
  
A terse lump’s flung at Stiles’s feet. The bread. “Now _eat_ , slave. And go to sleep.”  
  
Stiles is still breathing hard.  
  
“No,” Stiles says. “I’m not hungry.”  
  
The man doesn’t pause from where he’s pulling off his leather boots and placing them by the end of the pallet.  
  
“I’m not going to complain if you feed my dogs for a day. Though you’re a bit skinny for their tastes.”  
  
The moment is passing. The camp’s asleep. The abrupt killing of the lantern light and the man’s stride to a scant bodylength’s further away has opened up the quiet space for it to evaporate, this awful surge of something hot and tight and bitter in Stiles’s throat. In the stillness there’s only the sprinkled chirping of crickets and the sound of the wind, the flapping of flags nearby, grazing the surface of the night outside like pebbles skipped on a dark lake.  
  
So. His bared arms cooling in the chill night air, Stiles is starting to realize that he kinda sounds like a brat throwing a tantrum over his vegetables (well, if his mom could punish him by  _killing him_ ). It’s not rape, for the moment. It’s not really anything, for now. _Eat_ is a pretty innocuous order, given the circumstances - hell, one he and his empty stomach should be pouncing on.  
  
But still.  
  
“I’ll eat your food,” Stiles says, quietly, “if you call me by my name.”  
  
“It’s Stiles,” he says.  
  
Now the man stills.  
  
“How about I rip your throat out, _if you don’t shut up_ ,” the man snarls, low and hard, as he shoves open the quilt on the pallet that’d been folded-up as a precise square at its head. “ _You’re my slave._ You have no name now.”  
  
“I’ll call you what I want,” the man says.  
  
  
***  
  
  
Stiles fucking hates werewolves.  
  
He doesn’t care if it’s pitifully obvious propaganda. So what? Their textbooks probably exaggerate some of the massacres, but that doesn’t mean they’re all wrong. These guys _are_ a different species. _Homo lycanthropus:_ about ten times better at acquiring steak on this stingy planet than _homo sapiens_ , but dumber and more prone to fleas and mass slaughter. They look like real people, some probably even act like real people (hey, someone’s got to hold down a job for the rest of these guys to go off raping and pillaging) but they’re still animals at the core and they do shit like eat babies and enslave families and rape anything with two legs that’s smaller than them, anything that can’t fight back. They don’t look at humans as anything other than snacks or entertainment or holes to fuck: just another weaker species to stomp on in their path to conquer the continent.  
  
Like this guy. Vicious, arrogant _beasts_.  
  
Stiles tears his eyes away from the pallet.  
  
The sizable shape there’s been comfortably asleep for hours, as if the captive unwillingly sharing his tent is about as threatening as a houseplant. There had been a short, sharp flutter of panic in which the werewolf removed his shirt in the darkness and Stiles froze and froze but then the blanket was over him and he wasn’t pulling Stiles’s chain to him and the moment was over - not that Stiles has relaxed a hair’s breadth. This is a large, satisfied predator delaying his meal till morning and Stiles, painfully aware of that fact, hasn’t been able to allow himself to lie down yet, his shoulders still tense and awake. The sword’s lying there beside the pallet, a heavy presence within his reach if he strains at the chain, slinking on his knees with his heartbeat held in his throat; but it’s not like killing the werewolf would improve his situation much, unless a rapid capture and hanging counts. Or like Stiles could do him anyway, considering Captain Asshole could probably kill him in his sleep. With a pinky.  
  
Fuck.  
  
Stiles scans the sombre darkness of the tent, biting his lip, rubbing his sore ankles. It’s too quiet. It’s too tranquil, which really shouldn’t be a bad thing, but when you’ve been preparing mentally for blood and fire . . . well, somehow the quiet’s worse. Like there’s gotta be something bad coming, something awful, something that’ll match the sick pulse in your imagination. So you have to keep holding your breath. So it’s really a wait.  
  
Waiting’s never been Stiles’s strong suit.  
  
He fidgets. Twists the hem of the soft tunic in his knuckles. It’s fine material, better than anything he’s seen since they fled the city for Beacon Hills. Which has its own charms, sorta, but material goods? Not one of them.  
  
It’s been five days and five nights. His dad is probably still awake right now, sitting in their tiny lemony-smelling kitchen by the door, waiting. Probably not even wrapped in a blanket or anything even though Stiles has been warning him for _weeks_ about the cracks by the window, so now he’s going to catch a fucking cold and scramble around searching for Stiles looking like a feverish hobo and it’s all going to be Stiles’s fault again. It’s not like his dad is hopeless but Stiles has never been this far away from him, or for so long - yeah, he sleeps at Scott’s place from time to time, when his dad takes the nightshift for extra pay, but that’s _Scott_. Scott from two doors down, an honorary Stilinski, albeit one more with the legendary appetite than the useful brain.  
  
Scott, who he still has to find.  
  
Bad Thoughts. This kind of hushed darkness is way too fertile a breeding ground for them. Wisps of sudden feeling, an abrupt taste in his mouth. They form and skitter away in the lurking shapes of the tent: the small chest hunched in the corner, the eerie curlicued legs of the writing table, the lump by his feet he’s yet to touch.  
  
The pitch darkness, the weight of the night like a tangible shroud over it all. _The room._ Her room. The Treaty collapsing, the siege’s impossible and then certain beginning (they couldn’t believe it, how could they believe it), the candles and coal running out and the soldiers going down the street hammering on each door one by one to confiscate their wood - the kitchen table, the bedframes, the chairs, every scarred bolt and post of their home that’d seen a generation of Stilinskis grow up like cheerfully destructive puppies - the beginning of the illness that would crumble her from inside out, like a fatal flaw inside the most beautiful statue in the world, giving her the appearance of perfection until one day she was not. Like her candle too had run out, and there was no more left; just everything spinning away from them, inside and out, under the ground of their own house and beyond in the hollow streets of the city and the skies and the fields whispering that winter of horses and guttural tongues and death.  
  
Stiles, like an idiot, hadn’t really understood what was happening. His teachers used to call him clever ( _too clever_ , they’d mutter darkly), but at ten he was no match for his parents’ determination and somehow - and to this day he has no fucking idea how - he thought it was a kind of game at the beginning, the kind they’d play at school ( _okay, kids, it’s a drill! the bad guys are coming over the hill - now, remember where we shoot them, kids?_ ). At night they’d huddle by her bed like snowstormed campers around a fire, bundled in fat piles of their old clothes and every blanket and linen in the house (even the ugly floral curtains his aunt gave them for the wedding that they’d tucked under the ambiguously-aged fruitcakes, also hers), poking fun at his dad’s awful retelling of his childhood stories. Or Stiles would just do what he did best: make stuff up. He had a real thing for ghost stories back when he was ten, and the total darkness of the city just made it an infinity times better.  
  
 _Mom’s not feeling too good. Let’s try to cheer her up, son._  
  
The weird thing is, Stiles never liked Danae. Getting to live in a city is like winning the lottery of life at birth in the Homeland, but Stiles likes Beacon Hills more, likes its steep and solemn forests, even if there’s no running water, even if its people’ve never even heard of a bubbly bath or something called a steamtrain that can cross the Ilios in four days, much less seen one. Danae was a big city, the crown jewel of Sector Nine, but the memory that lingers in him like the smoke of a long-gone flame (because there’s always something left - the last bit of wick, the faint smell of melted wax, the residue that it existed) is the one where he’s wandering down the State Quarter chewing on his mom’s old cinnamon-scented scarf, seeing the rows of the government officials and foreign diplomats’ beautiful white houses, seeing their lights in the darkness. They didn’t use candles. They had this super-rare and sorta mystical thing called ‘electricity’, something that never ran out till the last day, when they were all gone.  
  
Stiles traces the rough scales on the cold bread with his fingers. She’d stopped eating in the last two weeks of her illness, protesting stomach pain. If Stiles hadn’t been such a dumbass, if Stiles had realized this wasn’t a game and it wasn’t like when he got a cold and some soup and her warm voice would make him feel better, he would’ve realized she was trying to leave more for them, even if that wasn’t much. The rations were so low by then even the family cat abandoned them (Stiles couldn’t blame Sergeant Schrodinger, he was looking pretty tasty to Stiles by that point). But maybe that was how they made it, had that last gasp of strength to flee the city through the flames and the wailing streets and the dark shapes sweeping into them under the only thing that wasn’t moving, wasn’t killing or dying or running or abandoning, the only thing he saw when he looked back: the moon, which was judging.  
  
Stiles has to eat. Stiles has to survive. There’s no room inside guys like Stiles - guys who are, let’s be honest, not exactly classical-hero proportioned - for ideals. If he has to sell himself - if he has to swallow his pride, play nice to slip under this werewolf’s guard - he’ll do it. _He has to make it back._ Stiles can’t exactly do anything to these bastards with his hundred-and-forty-seven pounds of pale skin and fragile bone, but survival’s how he’ll get his revenge.  
  
The feeling solidifies in him, a hard thing at the bottom of his chest. Let the furball think what he wants. Stiles doesn’t have anything but a tongue that dispenses sarcasm too freely and sheer willpower, but it’s gotten him to sixteen years pretty good so far, in a place that’s not exactly hospitable to smartalecks or boys who are better at reading and pranking their teachers than military duty.  
  
This is a game like any other. He won’t win straight-out, but he just has to figure out the rules, and then figure out how to break them. Might not make it out with his virginity or pride (or, well, limbs) intact, but - screw it. The asshole can have his body, can make him heel and roll over and call him _master_ all he wants; he’ll never have all of him. Not when there’s a part of Stiles left in Beacon Hills, and another one left forever in the fields of Danae.  
  
He pushes the bread in his mouth. Chews. Swallows, thickly. It’s hard and dry but his stomach accepts the edibleness gratefully.  
  
 _Okay, kids, it’s a drill! Remember where we shoot them?_  
  
 _Yes, that’s right - we shoot them in the heart._  
  
  
***  
  
It’s an abrupt choking sensation that wakes him. The chain.  
  
Clear light’s streaming through the open tent flap. Stiles’s first action is to jerk back, bleary-eyed, breath coming in visible puffs, but his new _master’s_ apparently distracted with his own chores in his tent - his back’s already turned, muscles bunched in a fresh grey tunic with the sleeves rolled up - so Stiles’s second order of the day is to check himself.  
  
Yup. Still virginal. _Awesome_. (Hey, he’s now the personal possession of a very large, very growly enemy who clearly enjoys the direct and physical application of violence. Stiles’ll take what he can get.) His limbs are still sore and his right eye is still insanely tender to the touch but Stiles is a hardy kid, and the whole ‘lying down numbly staring at the tent’ thing was good for him - all systems are go now, the bruises a lot less painful as long as he doesn’t touch like a masochistic idiot. Though in the morning light the sight of the shriveled plum color that’s blended itself into the usual milky pale of his abdomen makes his mouth contort several times in horror.  
  
The man doesn’t even glance at Stiles, at the crumbs that’ve been dusted off the fur coat onto the ground, but Stiles can feel the smugness radiating from him anyways as the man leans down to roll up and bind the pallet with terse, efficient movements.  
  
“Just so you know, I didn’t eat because you told me to,” Stiles points to the man’s back, feeling slightly braver or stupider now that he’s sleepy and irritable and standing in daylight with the warm fur coat clutched to his chest. Along with a half-night’s worth of nightmares. “My dad’d nag me to death if I came back too skinny.”  
  
“If you don’t shut up, I’ll send you back in slices the width of your finger.”  
  
Stiles shuts up.  
  
It’s a short routine. The chests and saddlebags are packed in no time. Then the man unlocks the padlock and yanks Stiles out the tent into the cold open air, where there are a pair of soldiers standing rigidly at attention, in burnished brown leather and chainmail with red armbands. Their faces are as weather-beaten as their leather and cleanshaven and strictly trained on the Captain, avoiding the boy shivering awkwardly beside him with a chain and collar around his neck and kohl smeared all over his eyes.  
  
Stiles resists the urge to tell them that it’s not, in fact, because he was crying from a night of satisfying their master.  
  
Not that they would care. He looks at them, at their emblemed red armbands: 12th Company. Either they were all out of uniform yesterday, or those assholes were from a different troop of wildebeasts. Apparently, they’re not always so grimy, or so free with their hands. Not in front of this man, which Stiles suspects is rather wise. Considering the impressive fangs to lenient-smile ratio. Among other things.  
  
The topic gets to him, eventually.  
  
“Where should we place the slave, sir?”  
  
“With the rest of the luggage,” the man says, without looking at Stiles, after ordering them to take _the slave_ to get his collar etched and then delivered to his quarters.  
  
  
***  
  
  
The camp is on the move.  
  
“Don’t jostle him,” one of the sharply-uniformed soldiers inspecting the carriages says, when their coach hits a substantial rock, and Stiles, pressed flat to the door, bumps his head against the cold glass. “The Captain won’t be pleased if he’s damaged.”  
  
“Oh, I doubt you’ll have to be worried about that,” Stiles says brightly to the air, since the soldier is already gone. “Unless you’re terrified of a reward.”  
  
The coach’s door is locked. The coach’s innards are so cramped with the rest of the luggage that he has to maneuver himself to sort-of tuck the fur coat around his shoulders and catch a much-needed breath. Okay. So they’re heading out. The pros of this is obviously avoiding another night in the tent.  
  
The con is the apparent prospect of replacing it with the man’s _house_.  
  
His torture chambers. His Dungeon of Doom. Ha. So that’s why his new _master_ wasn’t interested in anything last night - he’s probably saving the entertainment till they get to the fancy equipment back home. Maybe Stiles’ll meet all his other slaves and they can share horror stories. Stiles is new to this whole thing, but he can offer his stream-of-consciousness as he gets the back flayed off him for not spreading fast enough. Or for not having long-enough hair and red-painted lips, as the boy had suggested. Seeming to know about such things.  
  
Stiles really doesn’t know why his brain does this to himself.  
  
He shakes himself like a dog shedding water. _Focus_. Right: business time. Now that Stiles is free from his windowless box of a cell, he needs to start gathering as much info on his location as possible, and stop staring round-eyed at the very bad nightmare that _he’s surrounded by wolves everywhere_. The section they’re going through looks different from the rows of empty tents he was dragged through yesterday: the werewolves here are busy and teeming, packing up en-masse, loading massive drafthorses that seem specially bred for their bulk, shifting and recording supplies in distinct units. Every few rows are inspectors watching them and jotting things down with a quill. The precise discipline and coordination on display surprises him a little, considering how they seem to spend a lot of their time not showering and being rapey, but then again, they’re probably experts by now at the art of disappearing with loot in organized hordes. And they’re red-banded, 12th Company, so no doubt their super-nice Captain keeps just as gentle a leash on them as he does Stiles.  
  
Their voices stab through, stark and single-worded, stripped down to orders. There’s a guttural undertone, but the dialect’s similar and he’s never heard werewolves speak ( _speak_ , not shout) before now so the roughness might be natural. Combined with the lack of snow, this is actually pretty promising, suggesting that this camp’s in the south of Wolf territory, maybe even close to the border or the buffer zone. Which is good.  
  
“Hey, look on the bright side,” Stiles addresses cheerfully to the air. “You just need to escape an army of werewolves who can outrun horses over short distances and track scents from the West Sea to the Ilios. No worries.”  
  
They move quickly, at a canter. The sounds of the camp fade; the tents become flat grass, crunchy patches of frost. Nothing around, though he thinks he sees the telltale smoke of villages on the other side of the coach, through the little square of window not blocked by bulging hemp bags or rope. The destination, when he sees it, really shouldn’t be the surprise it is, but it still makes him startle, the sight emerging out of the earth in the pale cloudless sky: the hazy grey smear that he’d glimpsed yesterday on his way to the ring. The towers. The fortress.  
  
The pennants rising above the high walls, blue. The emblem on them: a dragon, twined around a sword.  
  
 _Holy shit._  
  
Stiles is going to see a city of werewolves.  
  
The black gates emerge like something out of a dream, in a cloud of dust as their horses pull up, the air ringing with the calls for _halt_ , everywhere submerged in shade: colossal, imposing dark sentinels, cleaving the sky. The walls they guard seem to stretch endless on both sides, fading into a horizon of washed-out blue. Stiles thinks, heart pounding, that it’s a rather grandiose entranceway for a single tiny coach, but it’s not like he has a choice in the matter, as the coach driver presents some sort of gilded placard to the guards, as the gates begin to yawn open with an ancient metallic groan.  
  
As they swallow him up, and close with an iron shudder that sounds final.  
  
“I never thought I’d see the day,” the collar-etcher comments later, fingertips still pressed to Stiles’s collar, as if unwilling to let go. The silver feels like a ring of heat, but it had been slow and methodical, painless, without the need to remove the collar. “The Twelfth don’t even look at slaves, much less take them.”  
  
He places a small round mirror in Stiles’s hand to hold up to his neck.  
  
“Not one for luxuries, the Captain is,” he says, a small werewolf with careful hands and a balding pate. “You must’ve caught his eye.”  
  
“Lucky me,” says Stiles, gazing at the word etched on the collar. “It must’ve been my unelaborate appearance.”  
  
The collar-etcher doesn’t seem to notice the dripping sarcasm. Bending down to place back his delicate tools, his voice is distant as he says, “I can’t say I envy you.”  
  
The word on the collar is _Derek_.  
  
The coach hadn’t taken the scenic route through the city. Though Stiles did manage to hear the murmuring din, snatch suggestions of civilization - masses of tall greyish and dark-roofed buildings and bright splashes of color in the distance over the treetops, with the soaring castle towering above it all much further away, its blue pennants twisting in the wind. Instead they’d hewed close to the high city walls, a rugged native ground which besides patrol troops was pretty boring - basically sporadic copse and wells and bleak-looking huts, but as long as the trees aren’t trying to kill him he’s not going to complain - and then went through what looked like barracks to Stiles’s untrained eyes, until he saw the children playing outside: rows and rows of huge stone longhouses streaked with soot, much bigger than their cozy woodboarded hutch in Beacon Hills. But not exactly the high life either - their thatched roofs were patchy and decaying like bald spots, the walls crumbling in erratic places like a row of gap teeth, held up with wooden stents. Scatterings of chickens and skinny goats loitered outside like moving piles of trash people stepped around without needing to look, nibbling at the frozen ground, in and among people tending to chores - hanging laundry on stretched clotheslines that flap in the wind like storks, fussing over squat black pots on the campfires - ignoring the coach, talking to each other in their low rough tongues. The collar-etcher was bent on a stool outside one of these longhouses, peeling an apple, when he saw them.  
  
Werewolves. Fuck. These look impoverished. From what he can see they’re about the same size as himself or even shorter (though Stiles is actually pretty tall - it’s just the horizontal part that gets him), their frames slightly hunched, the skin drawn tight around the bones in their faces as if wrung out by life. The scene’s - familiar. Way too familiar. It’s messed up to think guys like these could march off and slaughter Stiles’s people, when they look so alike, even in the clothing and the bent angles of their backs. When you could probably transplant half of them to Beacon Hills and no one would notice and Stiles would maybe barter writing something for one of them in exchange for flour. No wonder State Sec’s so paranoid about spies - if most werewolves looked like these Stiles would putter straight into their mouths with a basket of apples like that gullible chick in the fairytales.  
  
Maybe it’s just like his dad says though - you got the soldiers, but most everyone else is just People, people with a capital P, who just want the world to leave them alone. No matter which side of the border you’re on.  
  
The unsettling feeling loosens a little in his chest. Maybe it’s actually kinda like the Homeland and only the military here take slaves, like prisoners of war, while everyone else just scrounges for a living and couldn’t care less about Stiles. So maybe it’s not so different from back home, at least in parts, and the rules of this world aren’t so strange after all. That’s a good thing, right? Less to figure out. Less to untangle and make a run for it.  
  
He’s still surprised when the coach pulls up though, at a smaller cabin, set further away.  
  
  
***  
  
  
“Why -” Stiles begins, but the look on the man’s face, which is apparently the normal greeting for him, slams that thought in his face.  
  
The man is a commander of armies. Stiles’s dad has a pretty decent job, one outside the fields, but it’s not like they can afford meat more than once a month. Their little pillow-strewn hutch, however, isn’t shamed in size or girth ( _har har_ ) by this cabin, whose walls of rough-hewn stone are hemmed in by a few spindly black trees whose branches peek through the window, some still with a sparse scattering of red leaves. The cabin sits on top of a low mound, a thatched sea of wildgrass and weeds. There’s nothing around but winter, cold and lifeless and bare-branched; Stiles can see they’re well past the longhouses now, this cabin tucked in the meadowed woods as if exiled here.  
  
There are no manicured gardens. No grandiose terracing or strange foreign architecture. No bustling murmur of an army of household slaves. No guards even, that any well-off officer in the Homeland would patrol in front.  
  
When the man - when _Derek_ \- pulls him in gruffly by the very end of the chain, the faint scent of peat and dry wood greets him. Along with a den that’s surprisingly roomy considering how solitary it looks from the outside, but standing in it Stiles is prodded by the sense of something missing despite the familiar accoutrements of home (minus the Homeland flag of course): a ground of dark hardbeaten dirt, carved chests, a single vine-curled bench that looks purposefully uncomfortable, the hearth bare with fur throw rugs spread flat in front of it, an out-of-place assortment of random painted pottery and colored glass and strange-looking figurines crammed against the walls without any sense of organization, as if dropped there and left untouched.  
  
 _It’s all functional,_ Stiles thinks _. Except for maybe the bazaar he’s got going on there. That’s what’s missing, a personal touch. You could put anything from here into another random house and no one would notice._  
  
On the other side is a huge mantle of reddish fur that hangs nearly all the way down to the ground and looks like a epically-sized fox’s coat. A partition. Behind it is -  
  
“Whoa whoa whoa - can’t we, uh, talk about this first? I’m sure you’re a nice guy and all but - I really prefer being wined and dined first -”  
  
“Shut up.” But without teeth, almost distantly. The man - _Derek_ \- is looking around. And then he’s striding forward, leaning down to hook the end of the chain through one of the black wrought iron legs of the desk.  
  
The padlock clamps shut with a loud, decisive click.  
  
Stiles backs up.  
  
The brisk stream of cold light flowing through the wide window paints a bedroom only a bit more spacious than the tent, though the imprint that someone actually sleeps here is more obvious, the furs mussed and rumpled. The bed seems to be the thin goosedown-stuffed pallet in the corner, its blanket folded in crisp military angles - like the rest of the den, not exactly some barbarian commander’s luxurious rape-nest - but there are soft-looking furs sprawled on the ground, puddled around several elegant carved chests, and more of the random pretty bits and pieces as in the living room, pushed against the far wall. There’s enough space for a large desk weighed down by stacks of intimidatingly thick tomes and a tall chestnut drawer, while a pair of lanterns and a medley of armor pieces - belts, vambraces, gauntlets, leather greaves, chest armor - rest on a narrow stone bench that juts out by the bed. Beside Stiles is a small open entranceway, probably the bathing chambers, near enough to fall within the chain’s reach. ( _Duh_ , the dark voice in Stiles thinks. You wouldn’t want your new slave to be smelly in bed.)  
  
There’s a birch rod in the corner, by a chest draped in satin the color of ripe summer grapes.  
  
But stuffing Stiles in the corner like an ugly statue gifted by some third aunt is apparently the limit to the man’s attention. The sheaf of parchment on the desk he’s thumbing through must be fascinating. Or just not-Stiles, which is good enough. The pale light trickles patterns on the angular planes of his shoulders, the curved back of the black shirt. He must’ve put it on again. Or he has a whole chest of the same shirt. Somehow, that wouldn’t surprise Stiles: black is _definitely_ Captain Asshole’s color, which he’d tease him about if they were friends, which is a thought that’s so hilariously antithetical to reality Stiles almost lets out a scary, verging-on-hysterical snort.  
  
It’s weird thinking about him, thinking about this cabin, how it’s tucked so far off, how there’s no one here. Why it looks small and cramped and almost poor (okay, not _poor_ poor, but plain and austere kind of poor, devoid of small luxuries like a woodsman who might see the wider world maybe once a year). Which can’t be right, when the guy’s a Captain, and other werewolves keep shitting themselves when they see him so he’s obviously some kind of scary big potato and it’s not a title to sniff at.  
  
 _Rules_ , Stiles thinks. Different world, different rules. And he’s Soldier, not People. Given the charming personality, he probably hates everyone else and vice versa so sticking him out here makes everyone happy.  
  
It’s very quiet.  
  
There are no other seats beside the one the werewolf’s sitting on, though the fur laid on the ground looks about as inviting as any possession of a vicious fanged beast can be. Stiles doesn’t feel up to making himself at home though. What’s left is to stare around and rock on the balls of his feet. Squirm the coat more snugly around him. Fidget with its soft white lining. It’s more a cape really, or just the skin of a very large and unfortunate animal, because there aren’t any sleeves or stitching or anything. He guesses he owns it now. (Which is like, _holy crap, he’s wearing a polar bear. Scott’s gonna be SO jealous._ ) Since the werewolf hasn’t even glanced at it. Even though, technically-speaking, he probably owns it now too.  
  
The whole thing - the cabin, the coat, the werewolf leant over the desk on the other end - is just . . . _bizarre_. Surreal. Not even two weeks ago, Stiles was playing crossball with Scott, not-so-jokingly aiming at his freakishly lopsided chin (because seriously, dopey puppy eyes or not Scott is _not_ going to get away with targeting everything at his ass), laughter crystallizing in huffs in the fresh air scent of deep earth and green pine.  
  
This can’t be right. This has to be - some kind of mistake. A spectacularly shitty dream. Karmic punishment for years of not eating his vegetables and disobeying his elders.  
  
He can’t be stuck here, in this silent grey cabin, a cabin with iron grating on the windows and only one bed. A cabin that belongs to a werewolf who looks at him like he’s scum on his boots. A cabin that belongs to a man _who owns him now._ Forever.  
  
This can’t be his new home.  
  
The room fills with the sound of the quill scratching, the shifting of leaves outside.  
  
It’s been six days.  
  
“So. The decor.” Stiles flails a hand around in the airy direction of the half-assed bazaar. “Not bad, huh. I didn’t take you for an art collector.” Squashing the feeling back down, opening his throat. Like an idiot. An uncontrollable idiot. _The stupidest smart-ass that ever lived_ , that’ll be his epitaph.  
  
On his gravestone. In the ditch.  
  
“Maybe I like things that stay silent,” the man grunts, in a blandly edged voice, without looking up.  
  
“Wow. Hope you get a refund, at least.”  
  
“Shut up,” the man grunts.  
  
“Dude. Is that like, a reflex with you? Because I had this whole thing with the phrase ‘silly buggers’ back when I was five, so it was ‘silly bugger this’ and ‘silly bugger that’ and my parents thought it was cute until the town physic told them it meant I hadn’t passed my oral fixation stage -”  
  
“ _Shut. Up._ ”  
  
The man’s put down the quill. Now he’s got his attention.  
  
Stiles really doesn’t know why he does this to himself.  
  
“Are all slaves this incapable of following a simple order? I’ve met three-week-old pigeons I could train faster.” This directed to the ceiling, flatly, accompanied by an exaggerated rolling back of the shoulders as if heaving a great, long-built sigh, emphasizing the muscular breadth of them. A timely reminder. “ _Dead_ pigeons.”  
  
The grinding sound of wood filing against stone: the man’s pushing the chair back and getting up, a single, dragged-out movement like a sword sliding from its sheathe. It had taken him less than a dazed eyeblink to move from one end of the ring to the other, past a werewolf, and to cut open his neck.  
  
“Well, my teachers’ve been trying for sixteen years,” Stiles says, trying to keep his voice light, trying to step around the hostility. A hopeless task. “These days they just put me in the back so I don’t bother too many of the other kids.”  
  
Prowling forward. “You won’t be bothering anyone here.” In a sinuously light tone that matches Stiles’s own. If it weren’t for the threat underneath.  
  
Gulp. “Except you?”  
  
“ _Especially_ me.” Ever-so-slightly, a bared fang, buttressed by a rumbling growl. “If you enjoy staying alive, which I’m starting to think you don’t.”  
  
The wall meets Stiles’s back with a stony, tangible impact.  
  
Very distantly, Stiles remembers that he’d told himself that it’d probably be wiser to get in this werewolf’s good graces. If he has to play nice, to slip under his guard.  
  
 _Bit late now,_ he thinks wryly. If that was ever possible in the first place. Considering Captain Charming’s good graces probably consist of chewing humans with his mouth closed.  
  
There’s a chill draft whistling through the cracks between the window and stone wall that’s brushing his hands, his cheeks. Other places. The werewolf is pressing, as usual, too close. Though far enough to rake a dark, disdainful gaze down the length of Stiles’s body, making Stiles’s arms jerk up, cross over stiff on his chest.  
  
 _Well, this is stupid. Got any more bright ideas, partner?_ Seriously, he and his mouth are going to have to have a big no-no talk sometime soon. Very soon.  
  
 _What the hell were you thinking …?_  
  
The man - _Derek’s_ \- stare is hard. Unkind. As it was yesterday. Stiles doesn’t know what he expected. Humble abode or not this man’s a commander, alright, Stiles thinks, with eyes that’ve probably made a deeply satisfying career out of flaying grown men - grown _werewolves_ \- to shivering wrecks.  
  
Stiles’s eyes are wide and brown as a doe’s, the kind grandmas like to comment on as they accept his (low sugar) cookies.  
  
The match-up is hilarious. Hilarious in the _dude-you’re-gonna-die-in-a-humiliatingly-fecal-manner_ kinda way. Even if Stiles were a bit better fed, and a bit less awesomely bad at the hoops that every other kid his age seems to jump through without trouble, and armored in something other than soft cotton, and a dead polar bear, and a relentless lilac scent that refuses to let go.  
  
Plus - he turns the thought over in his mind, gnawing on it - there’s something else here, something personal. It’s not like Stiles has ever been Mr. Popular (if that wasn’t obvious from his grand total of _one friend_ ) but this werewolf’s dislike has a starkly unfamiliar rhythm to it, like the tapping of a drum with something rotten and sour inside that you can’t open and have to guess at by the sound: the _deep_ kind of deep, the instantaneous kind of repelling, and the _probably-not-good_ side of inexplicable (unless the guy has a severe hatred of friendliness and verbal speech - which, come to think, might not be far off the mark).  
  
 _He hates your kind._  
  
( _Yeah, well,_ Stiles thinks, pressing fingertips to the hard thing inside him, its smoothness, its coldness - _the feeling’s mutual here, buddy._ And Stiles actually has _reasons_ , real reasons, the sort that end in red poppies to mark lost graves.)  
  
 _Or maybe that’s just Captain Charming’s sterling personality._ The dry voice in him.  
  
“I think that sentiment’s more on your side,” Stiles says, hoarsely. Picks at the bony points of his elbows. Swallows, shaking his head as if trying to shake off a body shiver. “Man, this is like the opposite of love at first sight. Like, Repulsion at First Glance, or something. I have no idea what I’ve done to you, maybe you just hate me for existing, or -”  
  
“I do in fact hate you for existing,” the man interrupts, coolly. “And for being loud, annoying, and disobedient.”  
  
Stiles gapes. “Dude, you haven’t even given me a chance!”  
  
“I don’t need to,” the man grunts. “You’re my slave, not a prospective wife. I’ll treat you as I wish.”  
  
“Okay,” Stiles wraps his tongue around the word, slowly. “Why do I suspect you treat your dead pigeons better.”  
  
The man’s mouth tugs up in a wolfish smirk, showing teeth. “Now you’re catching on.”  
  
“So . . . basically your whole goal is to make me as miserable and terrified as possible,” Stiles considers. “Because you despise me, i.e. your lowly and very not-wife-material slave, with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. Got it.”  
  
A shrug. “Close enough.”  
  
“Okay,” Stiles says quickly. “I hate money and freedom.”  
  
If looks could kill, well - Stiles’s ghost would be flipping through hurdles to hurry deeper into the underworld by now. The blunt one the man is giving him now suggests that if he ever did get around to killing Stiles, it’d be with the monotonous bludgeons of a crude village ax, and not the quick death of a silver-shined blade.  
  
 _What the hell were you thinking …? What’d you expect, Stiles?_ But maybe that was it, he didn’t expect anything at all, just hurtled into this like he hurtled into the caves, dragging Scott’s wrist and Scott’s sighs behind him. This guy is the last person Stiles wants to think about, but he’s present, he’s right there in front of him, and Stiles, knowing Stiles, knew he could attach his thoughts to him like butterflies converging on a golden nectar stalk, over all the other shit, the Bad Thoughts, whatever.  
  
“Okay, so you’re really not cool with the jokes.” Stiles smiles weakly, shifting uncomfortably on his feet. The fur coat’s slipping and he lets it go, a warm weight pillowed behind his ankles. The wall feels cold and scabrous beneath his palms. “That was a joke, by the way. Just to clarify. Again.”  
  
“And they’re usually not that bad, either,” he adds, brightening. “It’s just that my comic material, er, hasn’t been that great lately. Um. Obviously. But I actually do pretty well with new places so, uh, give me a sec to settle in and you can totally expect some awesome Stilinski wit coming your way.”  
  
The man passes him the same dark, rough look that seems specifically cosmically crafted to make Stiles’s bladder squirm. Though (and it’s probably Stiles’s imagination) it seems less monotone somehow, as if tilting inside with something that looks like - confusion? Hesitance? Like something’s shifted off-balance in the ease of his swordsman’s poise, a texture under his footstep he wasn’t expecting.  
  
The moment drags out.  
  
The man says,  
  
“Your only order is to stay here. _Silent_. Don’t talk, don’t - _joke_ , don’t make too much movement. You’ll have food and water and other necessities. Otherwise, you can do as you like in this room, as long as it doesn’t bother me.”  
  
It takes a second for Stiles to digest it, but then his eyes go huge.  
  
“Wait. That’s nothing. That’s worse than a _prison cell._ Look at this room - I’ll have as much freedom as a _pet rock_! Considering there’s about _three things_ that don’t bother you, and those consist of _eat, sleep,_ and _shut up_.” Taking a deep breath, making a face. “I’m still not sure if you’re okay with me pooping.”  
  
“That’s better than most slaves,” the man snorts, already striding back to the desk. Curtly dismissing Stiles and their exchange, if you can call it that; though he remains standing, the straight lines of his figure brusque and aloof, the fingertips of one hand touching the parchment. “And more than you deserve.”  
  
“More than I deserve,” Stiles says.  
  
“Do you have an objection?” The man cocks his head, hard-jawed, languid-browed. “Because I’d be happy to answer it - with the rod.”  
  
The breath of disbelief escapes Stiles before he can help it. But a smidgen of self-preservation (which, despite what _Captain Derek_ thinks, does exist in him, just - very very deep down, and beneath all those other issues that he steps around like they step around those pigs at the longhouses, without needing to look) keeps him from letting loose. Though it’s close. Instead he bites his lip, clenches his jaw; glowers at the ground, which is bare and pressed flat and black and fragmented by bars of white light.  
  
It passes. Unlike Scott, Stiles has always been able to bury his anger quickly; to save it for later, when the time is cooler and better shaped for it. Stiles is already retracing the man’s words by the time his lip gingerly extracts itself from his teeth. (He should really watch that habit.) Much as he wants to resist dwelling on anything but Captain Asshole’s unrelenting assholery, the tendril of thought prods at him: there was something he’d missed, in jumping to only what was said.  
  
A moment later, hesitantly:  
  
“So you mean I won’t have to - uh, in your bed?”  
  
The man seems unfazed by the question. Without bothering to glance over:  
  
“When did I say that?”  
  
“ . . . be~cause there’s secretly a super softie beneath the gruff and rather terrifying exterior?”  
  
The man snorts.  
  
“Okay yeah, that was totally sarcastic.” Stiles’s mouth quirks up bitterly as he pushes a hand through his hair. And drops it heavily in the same beat, measuring at the stony fortress of a back with a sigh: “Dude, I’m not going to try to appeal to your better nature here, considering it has about as much chance of existing as the carnivorous purple unicorn.”  
  
“But you’re not going to fuck me,” Stiles says, “because you can’t even stand to look at me.”  
  
It’s barely perceptible but Stiles’s nerves are poised on such a highwire he senses it, the heavy shoulders tensing under the sharp black lines of the shirt. No other muscle in the man’s body rearranges an inch but his face tilts slightly in Stiles’s direction, the wind disturbing his collar, dark brows arched a fraction.  
  
“And how would you be so sure of that? Maybe I’m too busy at the moment to entertain an annoying slave.”  
  
“Too busy,” Stiles says. “When you’ve been looking at the same page for half an hour.”  
  
Pushing himself slightly from the wall, gazing at the man from under his lashes, throat paper-husky but clear:  
  
“Though I’m sure a list of Lycian timber types is _fascinating_ , Captain Derek.”  
  
The man turns.  
  
Everything in Stiles’s body tightens in anticipation of the approach, like a rope twisting itself to stillness, on the brink of two possibilities - unsure whether to keep twisting tighter and tighter, or to let go like a lash. But the man doesn’t come forward. Nor does he glare, or loom, or not-so-suggestively bare his fangs, even though you’d think those are his natural reflexes (not without evidence).  
  
Instead, he stays back, delivering a look that’s reshaped into something cool and assessing.  
  
The air is changing around them.  
  
The room is very small - a peaty fur-lined den for one man, not a man with his slave. The chain could extend to the pallet but if the man decided to beat him, or - or worse, he could press Stiles down here, and rest his knees on soft rabbit fur. Stiles looks at him, at the dark eyes, unable to look anywhere else. Knocking through the restricted space between them is the rhythm of his own heartbeat, flutter-soft and careful, like the beginning of rain on a hollow drum, too loud for a dwelling so quiet.  
  
“So what is it?”  
  
The blunt timbre of the man’s voice has abruptly stepped back. Something casual now circles Stiles like a hawk. “What are you looking for?”  
  
Oh. Okay. Those weren’t the words Stiles was expecting. Though he’s not quite sure what those were either, and he’d already flinched anyways. The flush that blooms hot on his face finally lends him the impetus to drag his eyes away, resting them on the grey sky divided by the grated window. “Uh, if you mean in general, isn’t it obvious?” Biting his cheek. “Dude, you know I’d run in a heartbeat. I’m not exactly thrilled to be some werewolf’s slave here. Or any slave, for that matter.”  
  
The man says,  
  
“You’re looking for a weakness.”  
  
His voice is very even.  
  
“I,” Stiles stares. “ _What_?”  
  
“You’re trying to make me talk, hoping I’ll let something slip.”  
  
“Uh - _no_ -”  
  
“Trying to get under my guard?” The man’s mouth crooks in a faint echo of a sardonic smile. But it’s not really a question. Not one searching for an answer at least.  
  
“Or you’re trying to charm your way into my graces,” the man says.  
  
“Some men might find your coquettishness attractive,” the man says, low and vicious, eyes dark and hard as a bloodsoaked riverstone in the clear sunlight. “I assure you - I’m not one of them. Play these sorts of games with me, _slave_ , and I’ll use the rod on you so hard you’ll be whimpering on your stomach for the next _year_.”  
  
Stiles is shaking.  
  
“Or maybe you really are defective?” Lightly. “Maybe you really are a spoiled brat. Maybe you really do require a hundred repetitions before it sticks.”  
  
“Maybe I’m tired,” Stiles whispers, breathing hard, blinking thickly. “Maybe I’m tired, and hungry, and bored. Maybe I’ve been kidnapped and - locked in a wooden box for days and I wouldn’t mind talking to anything that’s not a - a wall or a freakin’ piece of furniture.”  
  
The snort of disbelief comes close by his ear.  
  
“I’m supposed to believe that?” The man’s sauntered closer, but his gait’s no longer easy, it’s coiled into something strained, held back, like it’s taking everything to keep from thrusting forward like a berserker’s slaking blade, smelling blood close. The smirk is frozen on his face. “A slave wants to _chat_ with his enemy?”  
  
The stone is digging into Stiles’s back like the bristling of swordpoints. It hurts.  
  
“I’m not blaming you. It’s the reality of your species,” the man states, in the harsh ground-glass voice of a commander, passing a flat, contemptuous gaze down Stiles’s form. “Your grown men are weaker than our children by the time they can swing a sword straight. Even if you had a gauntlet to throw, you wouldn’t throw it.”  
  
The green eyes steady on Stiles’s face, watching.  
  
“I’m fairly familiar with the habits of humans,” the man drawls. “You can’t defeat me in the ring like a man, so you’ll turn to deceit.”  
  
  
***

  
 _Oh, and - that’s *Master* Derek to you,_ was the last thing he’d said then.  
  
Stiles would rather call him scum, or asshole, or furry bastard. If he could find him.  
  
Said _furry bastard_ hasn’t lied about his plans for him. The faint warmth of the sunrise slanted on his face prods him awake every morning to the sight of a wooden pitcher with a fat belly of water and a basket of hearty food you’d usually only get in good seasons - a loaf of bread thick as Stiles’s lower arm, hunks of cheddar, round red apples without bruises or withered spots, sometimes a small clay pot with stew or creamy soup and chunks of potato beneath the lid, and more strips of cured meat than he’s ever seen in his life - on the elegant iron desk. The bathing chamber, the small alcove that he can just barely reach with his chain, has a tiled floor and four chamberpots and kindling for a fire though it takes hours to heat enough water to sink his limbs into, and about ten minutes for the cold to chase it away. Sometimes there’s already hot water when he wakes up, the stones dropped in the barrel still warm to the touch, the taste of steam tickling his nose, suggesting that the other occupant of this dwelling left not too long ago.  
  
 _Derek_ , of course, is always gone before the sunrise. The odd flash of sudden venom doesn’t return, but the arrogant brusqueness that’s apparently his normal personality is little better, helped only by the fact that Stiles barely ever sees him. The moon is always high in a deep sky dusted with stars when he returns, shaking off the snow on his boots at the doorway, striding to the pallet without a single glance at Stiles’s corner. Like a bandit, Stiles thinks darkly, slinking into his own home under the cover of night. When Stiles shoots this observation at him, the man pointedly shifts his gaze to the rod.  
  
Stiles is left with nothing but the man’s dutiful daily glare (which he wields as a greeting, more clockwork than the sunset) and his own shitty thoughts, and a sinking awareness of how a well-kept cat feels, left to eat and sleep and lounge all day in a pile of fur. He drags them all to the window. There hasn’t been any development on the season-appropriate clothing front and the window’s too far from the hearth, so the furs are a lifesaver. And fuck it, he’ll take any small comfort he can get. The murmur of the longhouses is distant enough to blur into a nearer babbling brook and no one ever passes by - literally, _no one_ \- except a troop of squirrels, who endure his cursing and griping and occasionally the full-on _freak out_ for the sake of the bread crumbs. Sometimes a skinny yellow stray wanders by to scratch his back on the oak tree, and Stiles memorizes the pattern of the solemn bells that seem to be coming from the keep like a prayer: early morning, noon, supper, and the night watch.  
  
Somehow it makes him feel worse, the good food. His dad’s probably barely eating, or just getting by on the crap gruel they stretch out over the winter. While Stiles is - Stiles is just sitting here, eating like a king, doing nothing like a princess locked away in a keep and forgotten.  
  
Days pass. Stiles counts them with scratches on the bottom of the wall. Paces. Creates a lock pick by sharpening a nail from a rusty old horseshoe he finds in the outer room. (It doesn’t work.) Inspects every inch of the cabin on his knees and then his tiptoes, which is locked from both inside and out (“don’t bother,” _furry bastard_ says, “your collar would mark you in the city as mine, and you’d never get past the gates”). Directs increasingly desperate quips and sometimes an entire one-sided dialogue at said bastard, who deflects them with the blunt ease of a man looking forward to sleep, well aware that the breadth of his shoulders would preclude a more physical approach. Though there are carving knives in one of the chests.  
  
They fall into a rhythm: Stiles striking first when the werewolf appears, a quick advance and a watchful retreat behind the furs, and not so deep that _Derek_ would actually regard it as a punishment-deserving wound rather than the prick of a mosquito bite. The werewolf grunting something threatening in response, shrugging off the glances of Stiles’s metaphorical dueling saber like a bear brushing off crunchy snow from its fur. Leaving Stiles to stare hard at the ground in resentment and trace and retrace more useless convoluted plans for escape in it, while _Derek_ sleeps easily and soundly, and not like a man who keeps kidnapped sixteen-year-old boys in his house.  
  
Stiles feeds the stray most of the meat, which doesn’t taste as amazing as he thought it would and makes him think too much about his dad, who has probably done something stupid like beg for a pass to the city to look for him.  
  
Stiles’s shredded trousers are at the wreck of the raid, among the corpses of his fellow prisoners.  
  
Stilinskis are pigheaded. His dad won’t have given up.  
  
Stiles paces faster, the frantic thrumming of his heartbeat muffled by the stone and the fur. It can’t be like this. He can’t stay here. If he’s going to get any chance at all to escape, he needs to be out in the city, gates or no gates.  
  
The problem: no options. Shitty options. Stiles’s one and only talent is bullshitting. It’s the one skill he has - getting himself (and usually Scott) in trouble, and then getting them out of trouble, and then making it up to his dad with slightly less nagging about his sugar consumption (Stiles uses less and substitutes with honey, the only affordable luxury in the villages anyways, but god knows what their pitying neighbors are feeding him).  
  
Stiles isn’t going to bullshit this guy.  
  
That’d be too satisfying - for _Derek_. That’s exactly what he expects, that’s exactly what he wants - the world fulfilling his shitty view of Stiles’s species, as if _they’re_ the bad guys here - and the stubborn half of Stiles that makes up the lesser part of his valor refuses to give in.  
  
Which leaves him with annoying the man to death the noble and honest way.  
  
The werewolf comes back at night, as usual, the intimidating back of his dark shirt (all his shirts are creative shades of black) damp and plastered to his skin with sweat and the scent of oil polish and the crisp night air trailing in behind him. Stiles is sitting on mink fur and knotting the satin coverlets in the wavering orange light into a purple rope that will do nothing for Stiles but hopefully annoy the werewolf, somehow, when Stiles sees his heavy boots trod in, the wet sheen of snow on the heels. And gets up, throat prickling.  
  
“Look, you can’t make me stay in this room forever. That’s _crazy_.”  
  
Unbelting his sword by the pallet. “I can’t?”  
  
Arms flinging up in exasperated circles, Stiles rolls his eyes and snorts: “Well - yeah, if you’re okay with an increasingly neurotic, desperately bored teenage boy loose in your home. Pooping in your pots. Chewing your bed linens. Masturbating in your -”  
  
“Shut -”  
  
“ _Up_. Yes, yes, I know; I know all your ways, O Grouchy Master of Mine.” Huffing. “And your next sentence is going to be that you’re not amused by my tone, and then you’re going to give me a terrifying glare, and then I’ll go sit and stew in this corner and invent melodies with my farts. Okay?”  
  
The man, implausibly, actually seems lost for words. He doesn’t say anything as he takes out his hefty leatherbound books from the satchel on the desk.  
  
“They’re silent but deadly,” Stiles adds, with a note of satisfaction.  
  
The man mutters something that sounds suspiciously like “still working on that silent part, I see” but Stiles doesn’t like to think that sometimes Captain Asshole is funny, and so chooses to ignore it.  
  
“And then I’ll hold imaginary conversations in my head. _Why, hello Stiles. How was your day today. Quite nice, thank you, I invented a new cheese sandwich - the brilliance of it is that the cheese goes on the *outside*, by the way - wow, I can’t believe we’re actually having a civilized conversation and you haven’t threatened to kill me yet_ -”  
  
“Well I can start now -”  
  
“Dude, haven’t you ever heard of cabin fever?” Stiles whacks the knotted satin rope on his other palm, glaring at it, measuring its soft weight with studious fierceness. Wishing his voice didn’t give up the frustration - the desperation - so easily.  
  
“If you’re that eager for something to do,” the man suggests, grudgingly (as if he’s doing Stiles a _favor_ ), without turning around, “you can mend my old quilts. They’re in the chest.”  
  
“Fuck you, furry bastard,” Stiles mutters.  
  
“What was that?” Amused. Knowing full well that werewolf ears can hear a crinkled leaf drop at sixty paces, if they bother. Of course, Stiles is pretty much impotent, so he doesn’t need to.  
  
“I was talking to my dog,” Stiles says, voice dripping like honey. “He lives by the oak tree and his name is Furry Bastard.”  
  
  
***  
  
  
The messenger comes from Ivon, riding hard, but with traces of the sickly sweet afterscent of inn-brewed _chaldh_ in his breath, betraying that he’d dallied in coming until the sight of Sabina’s white walls rose like clouds on the horizon.  
  
Derek dismisses him. He’s not one of his own, and Derek has no authority over him.  
  
The report is disturbing. 7th Company soldiers had been inspecting the small town for rebels but, having found none, were loath to leave empty-handed. Instead they scoured the street shops demanding identification until they finally found a pair of Low apprentices at a smithery. The girls carried the King’s permit and pack seals that allowed them to work in a line traditionally restricted to Common packs, but the soldiers decided to get around this legal obstacle by taunting and harassing them until they finally retaliated by clawing one of the soldier’s busy hands.  
  
The soldier was from Whitethorn, a large Common pack, and a Lowly could not draw higher blood. The girls were imprisoned and their permits taken away. It would have ended at that, the usual flogging and a fine that would ruin their parents, if it were not for the alpha of Whitethorn suddenly remembering an attractive young man from Ivon that he saw last summer. The boy was, like the girls, of pack Clover, and now the alpha wanted to exchange the girls’ punishment into a rape of the boy instead. Knowing a Low pack would have to capitulate, he had written solely to Clover’s alpha, and not his lord, which would have been proper but unnecessary for his aims.  
  
Derek, not being an alpha of any kind, would typically not hear of this. Derek, being a royal soldier, should typically not have to deal with the thorny undergrowth that entwines his homeland’s social transactions like weeds grown so tall and thick that unfamiliar predators lurk in them. The distinguishing element has come from the fact that the boy is one of Derek’s own - a squire from the 12th. Derek can recall his face to mind: Caius, a wheat-haired 17-year-old who favors his left. Clover’s alpha was in no mood to pay a fine, so he readily agreed to hand him over, but in desperation Caius has turned to his commander. Derek has delayed his sentence as long as he can by pushing for an investigation.  
  
Derek throws down the report. There’s little he can do. The soldiers would have broken Pack Law if they had physically harmed the girls, who are still children, but none of the witnesses will testify for Lowlies, when Whitethorn is large enough to cause discomfort for them. Derek’s only recourse is to attempt to sway Whitethorn’s alpha with coin. Or attempt to bribe Jackson, who is not yet Lord Whittemore and a selfish brat besides, but more than capable of causing discomfort of his own.  
  
As a last resort, he can attempt a letter to the King, citing the need to protect his troops.  
  
It gives him the dull foreboding of a headache. He’s not meant for this. He’s meant for fighting, for war, for the easy numbing thrust of the sword that cools everything burnt and jagged in his mind like the first fall of snow. He’s a royal Captain and he should be at the border on defensive duty against humans, not patrolling his own countrymen alongside the 7th, lounging in a grand nobleman’s keep like a rheumy old battlelord gone to seed.  
  
And he has - other distractions.  
  
Isaac flinches slightly when Derek targets his right flank, a low cutting sweep that causes him to jostle off balance in the fluster of his return parry. Even in this state, Derek sees it, and notes it. And notes the small stumble that follows two exchanges later, and the elementary mistake of falling into the narrow tunnel that is his eye-sense, which is dangerous even when Derek’s slowed himself down to train his young sparring partner.  
  
Derek stops.  
  
“What is it.” Sheathing his sword, to brook the protestation of a boy who hates disappointing him in combat.  
  
Isaac flushes. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“Is it one of the men?” The problem with werewolves is that they heal too quickly to check for bruises. Though Derek has senses other than his eyes.  
  
“I - No! No, of course not,” Isaac’s eyes widen as he shakes his head hastily, picking up Derek’s blade and hurrying to the wooden rack to place back their dull-edged practice swords. He pauses by them, cheeks tipped red, the raised welt Derek’s blade had struck on his hand already fading. “It’s - um - I’ve been distracted. Sorry, sir.”  
  
“By what?”  
  
Isaac looks down, as if searching for a hole to drop into, all six feet plus and growing of him. “Well, the whole mess hall’s been talking about you and your - slave.”  
  
Derek stares. “Why would they -”  
  
“Well because everyone knows you hate humans and you don’t really bed anyone either so no one thought you’d actually take one of them so now there are all these rumors of why the slave caught your eye -”  
  
“Gossip. I’d think you’d be above that, Isaac.” With a measured look that inspires an unusual shade of tomato in his squire’s fair, fineboned face.  
  
“Yes, sir. Definitely.” Isaac squirms. Being more irritable than usual of late, and perhaps a little churlish because of it, Derek holds his mild gaze and eventually it bursts out of his squire in a rush of eagerness condensed in a single embarrassed breath:  
  
“Is it true that he has the ass of a Frissian peach and he can - _do_ \- things underwater like Tiberius’s pisciculus?” And adds hastily: “Not that I care. It’s just what they’re saying - those are the exact words, I mean. Sir.”  
  
Derek has to pause for an excruciatingly awkward moment to take this in. Buffeting him is the very strong instinct to tell Isaac to find new friends, even though Isaac has only finally made some in the last year and he’s acquired, on a few important occasions, the sort of useful info that only bored scullery maids can sniff out. Not really being, as Derek had said, above gossip.  
  
“I don’t even know what a Frissian peach is,” Derek says, slowly. “And I _really_ don’t want to know what a pisciculus is.”  
  
“So he’s not that attractive?” Sounding slightly disappointed.  
  
“I can’t tell,” Derek says. And stops, an abrupt flare of surprise flickering in him: the statement is true. Almost.  
  
“So . . .” Obviously hoping to mine for more gossip to bring back, but fearful of his commander’s wrath, Isaac busies himself with dusting the rack with a rag, the toe of his boot screwing back and forth in the hard dirt of the training arena. A lanky kid who never seems to have enough solid material in him to hold him upright, he looks like a tall flax stalk swaying a little in the breeze. Then some alarming thought strikes him, because he whirls around with his blue eyes going round as pools:  
  
“Wait. You didn’t kill him already, did you?”  
  
Derek snorts. “No,” he says dryly. “Though he gives me daily reasons to.”  
  
Isaac’s brows furrow as he processes this. “So he’s badly behaved? You’re having problems with him?”  
  
“No,” Derek says, bluntly, trying not to think of the boy savagely sewing in the corner, legs sprawled gracelessly in restless directions, patching the quilts with unambiguously pink flowers and a narrow intensity that would worry Derek if this was a werewolf, and this was the dueling ring. “There aren’t any real problems - he’s just willful and annoying. And that’s the last of your questions, Isaac.”  
  
The boy’s stitches were neat. Very neat. Much better than anything Derek gets from his tailor, though Derek managed to stifle his surprise. Derek wouldn’t be caught dead with these pink quilts, which was obviously the slave’s intention, but - joke’s on him, Derek will just pass them to the Clearfrost girls, who often fall ill in the winter and get deprived of pack heat.  
  
“If he’s annoying you, well - maybe that’s because he knows it’s what gets your attention.” Isaac, casually musing out loud. “Like a really young puppy, you know, before they develop pack-sense. When they bark like crazy you have to ignore them, or else it gets reinforced in their minds that barking gets them attention, so you’re actually encouraging the bad behavior if you shout back.”  
  
“The slave’s stupid, but he’s not quite at the level of a two-week-old puppy yet, Isaac.”  
  
And - no. No, he’s not really stupid. Gawky, maybe, since he’s obviously a village brat, but not - stupid. Derek is right to be wary of him, scrawny human boy or not. Even a human’s tricks can be dangerous when cornered, capable of scratching a vulnerable spot by chance, and stupid loud-mouth or not there’s something about the angles he chooses once or twice - subtle, unexpected, more unusual than anything Isaac’s straight-built mind can come up with - that gives Derek pause, tosses pebbles that disturb some old rock growth in him; threatens to brim the well of anger to the surface more than Derek likes. And then just when he’s considering if the boy actually _is_ even craftier than most of his kind, he’ll go and do something outlandishly different like retreat and sulk like a peeved child, or look honestly miserable - _miserable_ \- when his stray catches the cold sweeping through the keep’s hounds and Derek tells him that there’s no such thing as dog medicine.  
  
Derek doesn’t bother to tell him that a dog would never obey a human over a werewolf anyways, so no amount of scheming to use the dog to give Derek rabies or whatever it is he’s planning will work.  
  
“Well, just a suggestion, Captain.”  
  
Isaac’s light reply breaks through his thoughts like a ray of sun. His squire’s mouth is crooked into a small tight smile. “Not saying I’m an expert or anything, sir. Usually I just look at what my dad does in the situation, and - well, he always does something wrong, so I just do the opposite.”  
  
Isaac’s dad. An ambitious Common merchant from the coast who had beaten his youngest son regularly, despising him so much that he’d refused to accept him as his blood. Derek had found the boy in a Low pack that administered bathhouses - and other services - to indiscriminate travelers, abandoned in the city to a life that his father believed more appropriate for a son whose pretty mouth and crown of curls caught more attention than his hesitant sword stroke. When Derek first saw him he was hidden under the bed, which was too low for anything larger than a small child to crawl under. It had taken three hours for Derek to coax him out, while the housemam veered between fiercely scolding the boy for his wretched behavior and apologizing profusely to Derek, who in the end had to swear on his royal badge, and the King’s name, that he would take him from here.  
  
The other half of the promise was that he would take him home.  
  
(Luckily, in the end, Derek was able to convince him to try out the army instead, and in the next year Isaac shot up by seven inches and the sullen set of his face began fading like the spring snow. Though it is a darkly amusing thought that his squire could get him beheaded at any time for breaking a King’s swear.)  
  
Isaac still references his father at sudden times, breezily, like a passing comment on the weather, or a remark on the tartness of the apples. Derek tries to tell himself it doesn’t bother him. It’s not his business to pry into someone else’s personal history, and obviously he wouldn’t respond well if Isaac attempted such with him.  
  
He tells himself the look Isaac gives _him_ sometimes - the eyes dropping like a hopeless weight, the shoulders shrinking, anticipating - doesn’t bother him either.  
  
Derek passes by the stone-hewed vestibule of the mess hall maintaining the same stride, past the red standards, past the vigorous mixed scent of the stables. He doesn’t care what they’re saying about him. As long as their tones are hushed - and they always are - then he knows the iron band of his discipline holds. Everyone seems to be fascinated with his sex life (or rather, the lack of it) for god knows why but he’d rather have the men gossip about an innocuous topic than other things, and he knows there’s respect as well as fear through all the cussing and dick-talk.  
  
A bit of fear isn’t a bad thing for Isaac. Some healthy distance from Derek will keep that curly head of his on his neck a while longer.  
  
A lot of fear would be good for the slave.  
  
Lord Whittemore is a notoriously wealthy man, but his imposing keep is in some constant state of disrepair. Derek has to step around the crumbled remains of a man-sized swan fountain on the garden path that provides the quickest way to Jackson’s study. Looks like the groundskeepers’ invention to prolong the lord’s coin, Derek thinks. The thought is a little ironic: nearly every wolf in the city engrossed in the delicate task of doing the least work for the most pay, while the slave in his house rummages and upturns his pots looking for work.  
  
 _Why isn’t it working?_  
  
Most of the recruits and even the senior officers are terrified of him, or his reputation at least, and the wise-ass ones who aren’t learn to fear him quickly enough. This kid, though - maybe he’s stupid beyond comprehension, but there’s an obvious nervousness there that suggests he knows exactly what he’s doing, and what sort of person he’s doing it to.  
  
And yet he persists as if being quiet for more than two seconds might kill him. Derek know nows the name and the illicit love affairs of each of the sparrows that visit the cabin every morning. Not to mention the daily misadventures of Furry Bastard, a dark allegory for his less-than-fond view of Derek. (At this rate, with the animals the slave’s collecting, Derek may as well name him Snow White.)  
  
Perhaps Isaac is right - Derek needs to try a different tack. Adapt the training method to the material at hand. Too used to the docile little lapdogs at the royal palace, Derek has gone into this a little overconfidently, convinced that any slave could be trained to melt into the decor. But this slave’s not from royal breeding stock, this slave’s from the village, and you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. Or a pretty little figurine from a glowering, leash-ducking village boy, apparently.  
  
Unbidden, the memory treads quietly but swiftly into him, perhaps because the snowdrops too were in early bloom that winter. His father, a man big as a Northern bear and with a laugh that could shake the marble statues in the pavilions below, for once with a sober expression on his face as he listened to the sentence. The accused had been a loyal keeper for their slave stables for many years, but he had suddenly turned colors, become abolitionist; helped a dozen of the slaves escape, the human ones even to the Homeland. This was a capital crime typically met with a long and gristly death: thievery of the King’s possessions.  
  
Derek’s father argued against it. He was often noted to be loyal to his own, too loyal, even through betrayal. Even if they were - as it was often whispered - Lowlies, or mutts, or half-breeds. Derek had not bothered to watch. He had no interest in slaves. He was not going to be king anyways - it’d be Laura who’d have to pay attention to this boring stuff, as she often reminded their royal advisors, but with a bright laugh, knowing how well she was born to be Queen.  
  
King Hale had seen him wandering in one of the inner courtyards, looking aimlessly for his ball. He’d paused in the loggia, calling Derek to him. A grand figure standing between the elegant white pillars in his heavy fur robes, Derek remembers, a furry candy-sneaking mountain to his child’s eyes. Derek remembers his eyes looking tired, dark and sagging a little, but he’d mussed Derek’s hair playfully and grinned at his son’s pout.  
  
“Why’d you let him go?” Derek had scowled, reaching up to smash flat his hair.  
  
There were few things more imperious than King Hale when he looked down at you from his great height, but now he knelt to meet Derek’s eyes.  
  
“When you judge a man,” he’d said, smiling, “don’t look at how he treats his King, but how he treats his slaves.”  
  
 _His slaves_ had not shared the same sentiment. Two years later, the King was dead.  
  
Derek’s father was nothing like Isaac’s. He was not often wrong, but the time he was, it killed him. Derek doesn’t like to think critically of his father, a man greater than Derek will ever be, but after experiencing the rest of his growth to manhood on the streets he knows well now: where reality wars with ideals, the former emerges victor, and the war never ends. No matter how small or weak or pitiable, a human can’t be left unguarded; much less trusted, allowed to slip into one’s home like whatever far-off scent the breeze carries in. Derek doesn’t have much to lose these days, but for what little he has left - the slave has to be kept at a leash’s distance. Taught his place. Taught to obey. Shut up, don’t move, don’t bother anyone during the day, stop fidgeting and sewing like it’s a holy mission at night; be a statue, the kind with no more reason to shake.  
  
 _Well, he always does something wrong, so I just do the opposite._  
  
Derek glances at the garden below. Most of it’s been uprooted; only a small patch of snowdrops remain in a crescent of rubble, their white bells dangling downwards, as if searching for something in the snow.  
  
Derek isn’t his father. Derek doesn’t make his mistakes.  
  
  
***  
  
The silent treatment is working.  
  
At first, the slave seems to treat it as a spell of even worse mood than usual, and after testing the water with the casting of a few prickly barbs, warily retreats to his corner behind a strangely convoluted device that looks like the pitcher netted in a brightly-colored scrap-fabric rope (to lower water down to his dog, Derek catches, but he’s not concerned with what how some slave amuses himself all day).  
  
But it lasts. Derek remains stolidly committed to not reacting at anything the slave says, and even weathers the hard bricks of breadcrust he “accidentally” tosses in the direction of Derek’s bed. The boy’s increasingly rash quips make it harder to sleep, but Derek reshapes his hearing to dim and cast out beyond the cabin walls like a net, to low-slung nights filled with the flapping of owls and the rhythmic thrum of crickets and the crackling fires of the Low packhouses nearby. And this helps, somewhat, along with the fact that words don’t hurt him, not the way that swords can. He is a soldier, after all; he hears worse things every day over the lunch chow, and from people whose opinion actually matters.  
  
He might’ve overestimated the slave’s intelligence though, because he doesn’t give up for the longest time. But eventually, that storm does break, on a day that Derek comes back in a good mood because Whitethorn’s alpha accepted his offer of coin, even though it’ll cost Derek nearly a full month’s wages (that’s fine, though, he barely ever spends and the King’s retirement pension is generous). The slave is quietly curled up in his corner, probably silently fuming and strung out from a week of exerting himself to no avail, and Derek almost thinks about rewarding him with the chocolate square the baker’s wife thrust in his saddlebag when he wasn’t looking but remembers in time and slides into bed silent and stiff.  
  
A few days pass by in an uneasy but steady peace that hangs over the cabin like a lingering stormcloud after the rain. The weather is lightening a little - Sabina’s winter passes quickly - and Derek meets this season’s crop of prospective recruits, two of whom come from Clover. A few daring soldiers in the mess hall dart a curious glance at him when they think he’s distracted, but a glare resolves that issue quickly and the longtable hastily returns to talk of logistics and training and punishment - a troublesome pack in a Brylon village that can’t make tax, the suggestion of rebellious omegas in the swelling beggars’ population in Cantabria. _A suggestion,_ Derek says. But the lord of Cantabria is eager for any excuse to cull them all, and Derek‘s not - Derek’s a Captain, but he’s not High pack like the rest of them, and packless wolves can’t draw Higher blood. Or argue too long.  
  
 _He hasn’t given up,_ Derek thinks, remembering the long looks the slave gives him when he thinks Derek’s asleep, which seem to tip back and forth between a bitter want to stab him to death and a more pensive, turned-inside frown like watching himself fold and unfold a paper into some strange creature in his hands. Like he’s still thinking of ways to get out, still refusing to accept his place, even though Derek could crush him in his sleep, and make out the muted note of his scent - the new overtone ringing through all the old layers like a silver bell, surprisingly soft and gentle like the water by fresh pine, even though Derek’s still not at all happy it’s there - all the way from the brook. Which would make tracking an easy thing, and escape all the harder. _Not only annoying and insolent, but stubborn. Just my luck - a stubborn brat._  
  
The silence doesn’t last, of course. One day a voice says, quietly, out of nowhere:  
  
“Why’d you even bother to win me?”  
  
Derek has been coming home a bit earlier of late; his study is in the barracks so his house is actually quieter with the slave behaving himself, which is more conducive for eroding the mountain of paperwork that he didn’t sign up for but that seems to be growing day by day. He scans the ledger for the costing of the expedition to Brylon, and then the winter fests; much as the royal accountants would like to pretend that mutts and Lowlies don’t celebrate, the _chaldh_ brewers think otherwise.  
  
“I mean, all I do is sit around costing you food and firewood. If that’s what floats your triremes, I’d recommend a cat. Or a chew toy.”  
  
The slave pauses, furs shifting beneath him. “And before you correct me in your head - yeah, I know you haven’t used triremes for the last two hundred years.”  
  
“Three hundred,” Derek says.  
  
“Aha!” Triumphantly, sitting back on his hands with the small smirk of a satisfied cat. If the cat were nearly Derek’s height, and mostly awkward limbs and fidgety mouth. Derek realizes that he’s been had, and scowls down at the ledger. Which deserves a scowl, anyways.  
  
Maybe it’s the good mood he’s been in of late, or maybe it’s the sheer boredom of working through numbers for the last two hours that’d drive any man to delay more of the torture any way he can, but somehow, Derek finds himself opening his voice despite himself.  
  
“I was punishing Harkon. I wasn’t planning to win you. However, you ended up being an unavoidable part of it.”  
  
The quickness of the slave’s reply shows that this answer doesn’t come as a surprise. “So it’s true, huh. You weren’t interested in me at all. Which means this whole thing is a _fucking accident._ ”  
  
Derek lets him simmer on this. The slave can think what he wants; Derek doesn’t care.  
  
“I don’t need to be here,” the boy says, a while later, as if musing some minor revelation out loud.  
  
“If you’re that desperate for a new master,” Derek says, “I hear some mines up north are always looking for workers.”  
  
“Oh ho believe me, the offer’s tempting.” The boy snorts, but there’s a brittle, despairing edge to it that suggests it’s not entirely sarcastic. He chews on his reddened lip in a way Derek is beginning to recognize as a coping habit. “Man, if only I weren’t so crazy about my awesome tan.”  
  
Derek doesn’t say anything even though the slave watches him expectantly, so after a moment the boy sighs heavily and gets up, arms swinging by his side and his head in restless frustrated arcs. Automatically, with all this drilling of late Derek finds himself assessing him as he would a recruit: a tall kid, gangly like a colt with too much energy for his limbs and nowhere else to expend it- but he’s not a twig, there’s a good frame there and if he were a werewolf, Derek would think he could grow into them, maybe direct that desperation to move into real channels: controlled stances, precise strikes. A courseless flood into fluent ice.  
  
Well - if he weren’t a stubborn idiot who doesn’t know his place, or when to give up a fight. Among other things.  
  
Cracking through the silence:  
  
“Look, I have to get back home, okay? My dad’s probably going _insane_ because of me.”  
  
Derek glances down at the page. “That’s not my concern.”  
  
“Not your -” The boy bites off the muttered breath. For a while, it’s just the harsh hollow sound of his breathing reverberating in the wood of the desk.  
  
“Fine. Look - just - isn’t there a way I can buy out my slavelihood or something? Like, I’ll pay you whatever my market price is. I don’t have any money on me but I can work. You know - I can clean dishes or - or cook stuff and fetch the water or something.”  
  
“You can’t pay anything off,” Derek intones without looking over. “You’re a slave. You don’t get to sell yourself.”  
  
“Yeah, thanks, I wasn’t too sure about that definition there. I mean, it’s not like I have any personal experience or anything.” Derek can feel the audible rolling of his eyes. “I mean an _informal_ agreement. Between us. Since I’m about as useful to you as a congenital wart right now.” Voice loudening: “Look, I’m not gonna run off after scrubbing dishes for a week. I’m a village kid, I’m not afraid of hauling ass.”  
  
“I just - need to know there’s a timeframe on the horizon,” the boy says. “I can’t be here forever.”  
  
“Well, that’s not your decision,” Derek says. “You’re not going back -”  
  
“I have a _fucking family_ to get back to.”  
  
Said in a low, heated hiss. Derek can feel it on his skin even though not even the frost gets to a werewolf, the brown eyes boring holes in his side through the thin shirt like an Argent’s arrow. He doesn’t glance over. The ledger’s getting to the good part, anyways.  
  
Derek hears himself say:  
  
“It’s not entirely my decision.”  
  
And halts. Why open his mouth? Why should he have to explain himself to a slave? It’s too late though - the thread’s been tossed out, a lure the boy will grasp and pull until _something_ pokes its head out. He pushes ahead roughly, over the book: “There’s - others I have to consider. There are issues going on here you wouldn’t understand.”  
  
“You mean you’re keeping me here to impress your friends.”  
  
“Not impress,” Derek responds, automatically. The oil-splotched page glares at him, luminous in the warm orange light. He really should stop, but - the momentum keeps pushing him a little further, and it’s not like it’s any kind of secret. Nothing that’ll harm, just - inconvenient. Curtly, to end this:  
  
“The only way you could leave is if I sold you, or if you ran away. While I’m not opposed to the idea of selling you up north - if I let my slave get away with escape, I’d lose my honor.”  
  
“Honor,” the boy says.  
  
“I said, you wouldn’t understand.”  
  
He’s regarded for a moment by heavy-lashed eyes. Then, the sardonic words:  
  
“Well, apparently it means kidnapping a sixteen-year-old boy from his home, and beating the crap out of each other for the chance to rape him.”  
  
“You’re right,” the boy says. “I wouldn’t.”  
  
The deep well. It’s his anchor but - sometimes it’s too easy to ripple, too easy to waste on stupid things that don’t deserve his attention. “You don’t know anything about me,” Derek says, keeping his voice even, without heat. Though a growl is fine; useful for keeping a dangerously stupid slave in line. “I’d suggest you keep your mouth shut.”  
  
“Oh, I think I know plenty.”  
  
Cool on the surface, but the heat underneath is sharper, more intent. Heading him off, the way a filly will overtake his own charger, sometimes, when he holds back on the reins and the filly has no rider.  
  
He glances sideways. The bitter smirk looks strange on the boy’s face. Probably because it’s young, it’s soft-looking, not like Derek’s, which have seen too much killing and cruelty not to wear their signs. Then it dissolves - like Derek thought, his face can’t hold it easily - but into a hardened, more serious expression than he would’ve guessed at the beginning, when the boy was all comically huge eyes and mouth.  
  
The strike comes from a flat angle; direct.  
  
“You think I don’t know what you do in your free time?”  
  
The loose sweep of his arm takes in the whole room.  
  
“These ceramics, huh? These little figurines?” He’s breathing hard, tone challenging in a way Derek would snarl and pin down if it were a wolf. Lifted steadfast to Derek’s are those curved brown eyes, kohl gone but darker in another way, mouth twisting, red and jagged at the edges.  
  
“Not exactly decor,” the boy says, “unless your idea of a motif is buying a random item from every shop on the continent.”  
  
“You’ve gotten these from raids,” the boy says.  
  
“Not a bad guess.” Derek looks at him. “But no.”  
  
The moment pauses. Stretches. The slave is studying him, gaze bright as amber in shadows that drift back and forth over his face like a veil of leaves. Later, Derek would remember those eyes, even if they’re just mulish and brown and nothing important; even if it’s just some stubborn slave he shouldn’t be expending time on, or giving a sliver of sleep to, not with the humans at the border and the rebels in and around him in the South and Derek being called on by the King himself to deal with everything, even if he has to kill them all.  
  
The voice almost comes as a shock because it’s so quiet. A hand reaching to touch his sword, when he was expecting steel.  
  
So softly:  
  
“So how many have you killed, huh?”  
  
The eyes, studying him.  
  
“How many villages’ve you burnt? How many families have you destroyed?” Steadily, gazing. “I hear you don’t take any slaves yourself, Captain. You ever think about how many you make for the rest of your kind?”  
  
The slave says, “I don’t think you have any honor to lose.”  
  
  
***  
  
  
He should’ve punished him.  
  
He should’ve taken taken the whip to him, taught him his place the way Derek had to learn his, when he’d just entered the military as a rebellious brat who’d get himself flayed so often they named the whipping rack after him. Curbed the boy’s tongue like any young pup before he learned, through the lack of negative reinforcement, that he could push at the boundaries with his master and get away with it. By walking out, Derek had left him the impression that backtalk would be tolerated, that his master was all bark and no bite and that the leash could be loosened if strained at, as Derek had already ended up allowing for the sole reason that it seemed less work to endure his chatter than to get up and end it.  
  
His fault. Above all, even if the slave were easily trainable, Derek shouldn’t have taken him in the first place. Derek hasn’t lived with anyone (really _lived_ , not slept in the same barracks with) for nine years now and if he can’t even handle sharing his quarters with another of his kind, how was a human going to be any easier? Much less a human boy that’s all of sixteen and willful and insistent on bugging Derek like a melody that’s hard to get out of his head, following him everywhere, from his bed to the barracks to the keep where the memory of those accusing eyes and unruly mouth trail him like the scent of the fresh uprooted gardens below.  
  
Derek, apparently, got the luck of the draw, and now he’s stuck with the consequences. _That’ll teach him,_ he thinks, _to allow these things to keep getting to him._ Fourteen fucking years, and -  
  
Jackson’s blade dodges, slips under his guard.  
  
Derek turns it aside with a quick lean and flick of his wrist, but not before it scrapes his lower arm. Jackson always trains with a sharp blade, which doesn’t worry Derek but - _well_ , he glances down at it, _looks like a trip to the tailor._ Annoying. On top of other annoying things.  
  
Jackson’s eyes narrow.  
  
“Don’t bullshit me,” he says, pulling back, shoulders stiff. “Which whelp of yours do you want me to rescue this time?”  
  
“None,” Derek says, holding his stance, gazing at him. Jackson’s talented and Derek doesn’t actually mind training him, especially when it’s a distraction that’s actually useful, but there’s a paranoid tension in the young lord that’s constantly on alert for - something, god knows what - that keeps him from fulfilling his ability, no matter how much he trains. Not anything Derek can do about it.  
  
Jackson looks about to say something that will make Derek want to slap him, as usual, but he’s interrupted by other voices striding across the courtyard.  
  
“Twelfth! Fancy seeing you here, in a royal training hall.”  
  
Derek looks at them through the slender pillars of the loggia: courtiers. Some minor lords’ sons and daughters, who congregate around Jackson the way the ladies’ bright silk fans flock around them and block out the sun. They’re in casual dress whose long sleeves and fine gloves conceal their House emblems but Derek recognizes them: Houses Markal, Greenberg, Canidia, Ragnhild.  
  
He hasn’t bothered to learn their first names.  
  
Greenberg had emphasized _royal_. “Under the lord’s privileges,” Derek says, slowly, nodding in Jackson’s direction, who is already walking off without a glance. Derek had once assumed this was one of those typical inexplicable social dances that nobles play with each other, sometimes, but he thinks more these days that Jackson just doesn’t like them, the way he doesn’t like anything.  
  
They don’t seem bothered. Jackson’s not their target today.  
  
One of the ladies pounces, lowering her fan to smile at him with blood-red lips. Canidia, the blonde. Her eyelashes are tipped in tiny glinting diamonds as she gazes at him with open hunger. Though for him, or for scandal, Derek can’t tell.  
  
“I swear, Captain, you get handsomer and handsomer every time I see you.”  
  
This was said throatily, expectantly, awaiting the same observation returned to her for courtesy’s sake.  
  
Derek says, “Thank you, milady.”  
  
Greenberg cuts in as the frown blooms faintly on her face, a lanky young man with splotchy reddish skin and a permanent smirk adorning his narrow face. “Hey, Twelfth - what’s this I hear about you getting a slave, eh? Thought you weren’t into this frivolous stuff. Congrats - he must put the fucking goddesses to shame.”  
  
“Lucky boy,” the straight-haired brunette murmurs in a husky voice; Ragnhild. “Gets to ride the Captain all day, when the finest wolves in all the land have been trying so hard for a mere kiss for years.” She turns to Canidia beside her with a conspiratorial expression splayed over her fair features. “How do they say it? ‘He must have the ass of a Frissian peach’.”  
  
“Oh, nobody uses that expression anymore, Ava. We reference Titinius’s statues these days.”  
  
“That reminds me,” Canidia turns back to Derek, apparently having recovered, an eager gleam in her eye, “when do we get to see him? My Vaska needs a playmate, I’m so busy with Brigid’s cotillion that she’s gone neurotic squirreled up in the keep - chewing the bedcurtains and everything.”  
  
“That’s because you spoil the crap out of her,” Greenberg drawls. “It’s a fucking human, not a lapdog. None of mine ever misbehave because they know they’ll get the beating of their lives.” With a sidelong glance at Derek, still standing silent. “How’s your slave do, Twelfth? No problems with him, I bet. Just shoot him one of your glares and he’ll be spreading faster than Lucia at a knights’ tournament.” Ducking to avoid the smack of Canidia’s fan.  
  
“He’s fine,” Derek says.  
  
“Well, I can recommend Halsford - he’s from Arrowsmith - if the boy ever gives you any trouble,” says Ragnhild. “He’s been working with slaves for the last twenty-odd years, and he’s very good - I’ve been using him for some of my younger ones. I had a wild redhead last year who was absolutely intractable but Halsford’s worked wonders on him. Greenberg, you’ve tried him out, haven’t you? Wasn’t he lovely?”  
  
“Docile enough,” Greenberg grunts. “But rubbish with his mouth. And stop calling me Greenberg.”  
  
“Thanks,” Derek says. “I think I’m good though.”  
  
“Have you given him a name yet?” Canidia, still insatiable for gossip.  
  
“Not yet,” Derek says.  
  
“Well, don’t name him Etienne, I was just at Brigid’s court and it’s all the rage with the little blonde ones that seem to be so popular these days.” Canidia shudders. “It’s so _gauche_. I hate these new money types.”  
  
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Derek says.  
  
It was looking an increasingly difficult task to extricate himself. But then Markal, who’d been staying silent till now, finally spoke.  
  
“We need to get to the stables.”  
  
His deep voice is jarring. Derek looks at him: a wiry young man a little younger and shorter than Derek, who holds himself carefully with a watchfulness more like that of a Ranger used to border work than a courtier’s easy security. Derek remembers his father: Sir Njall, an accomplished fighter who in Derek’s childhood had led a successful campaign into Icythia, now the northern tip of the buffer lands. His son has his characteristic thatched bronze hair, as if dropped from a height to splatter on his head, and tan, forgettable features. Except the prominent one by his side, resting dully in this shade: the unsheathed sword. The hallmark of his House, “ _whose sword never sleeps_ ”.  
  
The other three murmur some light agreement, caught up in some teasing fan-waving banter between Greenberg and Canidia. Markal turns to him.  
  
“I guess we have a common topic now,” the young man says, blandly, an unreadable undercurrent in his voice. Not quite talking about the weather, but close.  
  
“I -” Derek hesitates. A _common topic_ with nobles is not exactly at the top of his Yule wishlist.  
  
“I guess so,” Derek says, after a moment. Equally bland.  
  
Markal pauses. He seems to be trying to find more careful words, but, having found none, proceeds. “I’ve heard of your rules for your troops. I didn’t think you were interested in taking slaves yourself.”  
  
“I didn’t think so either.” Derek, dryly, before he can help himself.  
  
Derek can tell this surprises Markal, though it’s only a flicker before his face reassembles its composure. “Not quite as you thought?”  
  
"I’ll survive.” Deadpan. “Not sure the slave will though.”  
  
The edge of Markal’s mouth crooks up, a fracture in cliff rock. Nodding towards Derek, he pulls at the sleeve behind him (Greenberg, who barely notices because his whirlwind argument with Canidia is already dragging them away) and says as he makes his leave:  
  
“Don’t worry - I’m sure he’ll bring you good fortune and pleasure anyways, Captain. Give him a fine name, and my regards.”  
  
A short exchange. Derek stands silently for a moment before taking his leave, watching Markal go, loping casually after his friends like a lanky coyote. He’d given Derek the traditional salute of farewell, a fist over his heart; one typically reserved for wolves with packs.  
  
  
***  
  
  
Derek is determined not to fall for his tricks again, and the slave seems to sense it, giving up quickly to lie quiet in his corner, radiating hostility and frustration.  
  
Another day passes, in silence.  
  
And another -  
  
“So you’re just going to ignore me forever, huh.” Quietly.  
  
Derek doesn’t say anything. _He’s giving up,_ he thinks, pulling the thin field-ration blanket closer to his shoulders. _Good_. Derek will get his old life back soon, with just a few added expenses to feed and clothe the extra mouth. He’ll be able to get back to focusing on drills and patrols and, if the King acquiesces, to duty at the border - to far-flung nights and the hard soil under his back and the scent of old forests empty of men and awake with owls, all his senses alive and raking through the woods and the razed underbrush of no man’s land like a fishhawk over water. Waiting for the horns, waiting for _their_ scent; the whistle of arrows, or the sharp cracks that shatter the night. The kind of life he wasn’t born for, but chose for himself.  
  
It’s not a bad one, all things considering. Travelling solo through life suits him, lets him take or leave things as they come. A fall from royalty might hurt bitterly for some men, open a scar that can never close; but not Derek, who didn’t much like courtiers back then either. He wasn’t meant to be King - but he was meant for war.  
  
 _Good fortune and pleasure._ Derek snorts to himself. He’d take a little bit of rest.  
  
  
***  
  
  
Derek was wrong.  
  
The storm had never broken.  
  
The storm greets him when he returns, exhausted from a morning of shock-drilling the new recruits and then a long and fierce trial through evening of resisting His Majesty of Cantabria’s demands to use his troops, the sort of duel that Derek can never get used to, the sort that twists awkwardly in his chest long after.  
  
The storm had not waited for him. The storm was a violent wind that swept through the room the creaking door opened to, silent and dark before Derek’s boots, revealing in the slanted moonlight not the flat hardbeaten dirt of his home, a home where no man's boots but his own has entered for years, but rather a surreal warground of shattered pieces - ceramic, clay, wood, glittering colored glass - strewn across the ground like jagged seashells after the tide.  
  
Everything is still. It looks almost, strangely, peaceful. Not the jarring chaos of a crime scene, but the hushed reverence of a graveyard.  
  
It takes a second for Derek to recognize what’s happened. In that second he looks up and sees the slave sitting by the far wall, arms clenched around his knees, staring at the ground in front of his bare feet.  
  
Staring at what he’s done.  
  
Derek steps in. The fox mantle is gone. He has a clear view of the entire den, which has always been small but seems expanded now, emptier without the things that’d poked up against the walls, even though Derek had never bothered to look closely at them; it's just that their presence has sunk into him over the years anyways, become a part of his skin like the feel of the sunrise on his shoulders and the sound of steel. In the dim light he has to strain his sight but werewolf eyes are sharpest at night and in one sweeping glance he sees that the damage is thorough - there are two or three barely cracked clay jars in the corner, a few stone carvings still mostly intact if with scratched paint, but the majority have been crudely shattered or cut into random pieces as if in a violent rage against the walls, or with a determined hammer and sword.  
  
Derek walks forward, slowly. Glass and clay crunch beneath his boots with each step. He grinds them. A few of the fur pelts look ripped, but cleanly, as with a blade. Tufts drift here and there. The air is heavy with fine dust and in the open moonlit space in front of him, the faint traces of long-evaporated sweat; the thicker, more present black smell of fear.  
  
The voice appears and dies like the glimmer of a firefly, so quiet Derek almost doesn’t catch it even in the dead silence of the cabin.  
  
“I used the carving knives too.”  
  
He hasn’t lifted his eyes yet. Derek looks at him. Lets him wait.  
  
Then he sees it, two brutally ransacked paces from the slave’s feet.  
  
Not all of it. Just the top half, which begins in a severed black nose, and ends with a splintered abdomen chipped of random chunks of its fading reddish paint.  
  
Laura’s fox.  
  
A white blankness moves his hand. A white blankness grips the slave by the back of his neck, shoves him at the pallet. Watches him stumble to his knees, the pale square of moonlight painted like a nun's wimple on the back of his tunic, his chain, across the sharp shoulder blades that jut out like bird wings.  
  
Not quick, not slow. Methodical. Everything around him inside him submerged in the distant white-foam roar _the last fucking thing I have of her the last fucking thing I -_  
  
 _\- Laura -_  
  
“Lie down,” Derek says. “Lift up your shirt.”  
  
The slave doesn’t move. Derek pushes him down with one hand - he doesn't struggle - and with the same hand pushes up the soft tunic, up to the armpits to bunch around his neck, over the silver collar, exposing the lithe expanse of a back unmarked and pale and dusted with freckles, angular with a young man’s musculature in the moonlight.  
  
Derek shoves a scrap of fawn-dappled fur in the slave’s mouth, in the corner. Surprised, the slave’s mouth actually startles open.  
  
“Bite down on it,” Derek says.  
  
With his other hand he takes ahold of the slender rod. A light weight in his hand. Supple, numb as frost to the touch.  
  
The air is too chill to sweat but the slave’s back is taut with tension when Derek begins.  
  
He doesn’t count. He can’t count even though the part of him that’s a man and not - _this_ \- knows he should, he lets the white nothingness drive him, drive every downward arc of his arm like the lash to a horse, knowing that such a thing as pain exists, that the weight of the arm exists and yet those are concepts too far to reach and he lets the water shove him down, again and again, spaced precisely apart in exact cadence, one after another, _two, three_ -  
  
The scent of blood.  
  
Shockingly, dizzily, vision returns to him in sharp focus like a violent rush of air to his lungs. He stops. Stares. Everything is very bright. Some bits and pieces, sharper than others, make the jump to consciousness: the red smear on the slender rod in his hand, glistening and blunt in the over-bright field of his eyes. The small triangular cut gaping open in the middle of the boy’s back like a blossom, mutilated and pink, below the jutting shoulder blades, close to the spine. The landscape that surrounds it - dark red bruises long and vertical like bamboo welts, just barely not-tearing, crisscrossing down nearly the entire expanse of trembling skin, down to the narrow dip of the waist.  
  
“I - _Stiles_ -”  
  
The rod makes no sound when it drops. Tilting beneath Derek is the pallet, though nothing in this cabin’s moving.  
  
He had forgotten. Used to the discipline met on werewolves, he had forgotten that a human could not endure the same force, or heal a gaping wound in minutes, or a brutal beating in two painful but limited nights.  
  
This one won’t heal for a long time.  
  
He hasn’t cried out. Or maybe he did, and Derek didn’t hear him. The slender back is heaving in obvious pain, covered in a fine quivering sheen of sweat that glimmers in the moonlight like the stone walls of the cabin in the morning after a night of rain. Despite the promise of muscles the hollow between the shoulder blades is deep, sunken in a too-long developed way that a month of solid feeding can’t fix. He’s very young. Maybe at that age Derek was in the army getting himself flayed liberally and regularly, only barely preserving his head on his shoulders thanks to his talent but this one’s no soldier, this kid’s just some village brat who probably spent most of his time scrounging for food, with the most punishment he’d ever received a clip to the head, or a slap from some redfaced farmer’s wife for teasing.  
  
Derek leans back on his heels. His own pulse is too loud in the quiet.  
  
Neither of them speak.  
  
The slave’s pushed his face in the thin mattress so deep Derek would think he’s suffocated or choked on his gag, if it weren’t for the jerky rise and fall of the back. With his sharpened ears Derek can hear a weak muffled sound burrowing into the goosedown.  
  
Derek recovers himself first, as expected. He says, more roughly than he wants but - it’s not like that matters now - “Don’t do that again.”  
  
No reply.  
  
Derek stands up. The window isn't entirely closed and the draft is cold on his neck; he’s sweated. Doesn’t bother to wipe it. Looks elsewhere, at the broken litter smashed and scattered across the ground all the way to the edges of the walls like the debris after a storm. Everything that’s now rubbish, being irrecoverable.  
  
“You were wrong,” Derek hears himself say, low and emotionless. “I don’t keep anything from raids.”  
  
“These were thrust on me by other werewolves.” He brushes a glass deer with his boot to the side, its stalklike neck broken in two. “After I helped them or their pack in some way. Since I don’t accept money, or bribes.”  
  
His voice is recovering its hardness. As well a commander should. “They worked hard to make these. Many spent years learning their craft. I don’t care how you choose to retaliate against me, but you don’t destroy their time and effort.”  
  
He looks at the slave, at the slender discoloured back that’s finally beginning to calm in breath though still interrupted by small convulsions. The blood is trickling down the curve of his sides to sink into the blanket, tracing around the shoulder blades, but it’s slowed, dragged down now by its own weight rather than the active force of a heart.

“The healer’s asleep. Wash yourself for now. In the morning I’ll send you to him.”

He continues, harshly: “Then you’ll begin working in the city, at the potter’s and wood carver’s, to make up for so lightly destroying their work. I know them, and I’ll know if you’re shirking. The cloth you will repair here. As you’ve shown yourself capable of.”  
  
The body shifts, stiltedly, on the narrow pallet. It looks like a newborn foal struggling to get up but eventually the slave pushes himself upright, back still bared to the air, still to Derek, a hunched wall of bristling tension and trembling shoulders and the uneven jerks of a breath snatching, trying to take in air. And to repress other sounds.  
  
Derek says, “If you pull a stunt like this again, I’ll -”  
  
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” Bitterly, hoarsely, breath snagging in places. “You’ll take the rod to my back.”  
  
Derek looks at him. “No,” Derek says, evenly. “I’ll leave you in this room, and no one will ever pay attention to you or your childish tantrums again.”  
  
The slave doesn’t say anything. A cloud’s moved over the moon and in the soft muted light his shoulders have stopped trembling; now they look like stiff white sentinels perched an ocean away, on some distant peak. Derek has a sudden, mad urge to grip one of them and whirl him around - check his face -  
  
He steps back, boots heavy. Stiles will be fine. No one had ever asked Derek if he was okay, and in the end he survived. Maybe even came out better for it.  
  
“Clean this up.” Derek leaves it at that, walking out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coupla notes:
> 
> Yes, Danae is a slight reference to Danaë (but without the umlaut, so pronounced differently) in mythos, who is the mother of Perseus. Perseus happens to be the human hero who killed the Medusa, which ties back to the Sicilian triskele that symbolizes the pack of alphas in S3 (go read the meta on this, it's great!). 
> 
> Caerlon is the name of the province (capitol: Sabina, ancestral seat of House Whittemore), not the name of the entire wolvish kingdom. This name was eminently made up, but there is indeed a Caerleon in Wales that was the site of Isca Augusta, a great Roman legionary fortress, and has literary ties to King Arthur (I think).
> 
> I expect chapter lengths to vary significantly, because I work off plot points and where I want to cut things off rather than wordlength. However this chapter is definitely on the higher end. :P 
> 
> And as you can tell, this story is *extremely* slow burn, and a mix of both fantasy and scifi. Part of it is that I have two AU societies to develop here, so it may go a little slow. Feel free to tell me if it's getting too slow or boring though! We'll be heading into more action from here on out. :)

**Author's Note:**

> Feedback much appreciated. I'd be happy to answer any questions. ;)


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